


The Safest Thing

by dust_and_gold



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, Angst but happy ending, Art, Bellarke, Conceal Don't Feel, EVERYONE ELSE IN THE ROOM CAN SEE IT, F/M, Fan Fiction about Fan Fiction, Fandom, Friends to Lovers, I started this like three years ago but here we are, Meta, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, YouTube, a healthy amound, a lil bit of smut, bellarke af, but ANGST, but hopefully worth it, cute fluff, fanfic-ception, look i dont know how to tag things it's been a while, naked art, shipping plots, their own worst enemies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-14 15:32:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 27,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14772320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dust_and_gold/pseuds/dust_and_gold
Summary: Clarke Griffin is a sophomore in college with straight As, her life on track, and an improbably popular YouTube channel with a thriving fanbase. Who all seem to really, really want her to date Bellamy Blake. Who is obviously, definitely, 100% just a friend.Right? Right.Never mind that there are entire tumblrs dedicated to their relationship, and  hundreds of fanfictions about them. She'd never read them. Because they're just friends....Right?





	1. Absolutely Nothing

 

The first time Clarke talked into a video camera, she was sure nobody would ever talk back.

That’s what made it safe, after all. A camera was just a machine, cold and objective, metal and plastic and circuitry. A camera didn’t pry, always expecting more _emotion_ and _honesty_ and _openness_ , like her mother had, back when she’d still bothered to ask. A camera didn’t talk back.

Until, of course, it did. First with one voice, and then twenty, and then a hundred, and then somehow tens of thousands of voices all talked back.

Clarke kept telling herself she’d quit once she hit a hundred thousand subscribers. A hundred thousand was beyond sanity. A _hundred_ followers was intimidating, let alone a thousand times that number. She’d never thought people would actually want to watch her discuss the inane nothingness of her life at Kane University. Her channel was meant to be an outlet, a helpful and impartial entity to confide in when the raw loneliness of a new school and a new state and no friends threatened to overwhelm her.

So one hundred thousand was the capping point. Clarke was good at capping points and slamming lids closed. Once her channel grew too big, Clarke would shut it down. The moment it morphed from an outlet to a source of stress, it would be gone.

And then she passed two hundred thousand.

Three hundred thousand.

By the time she hit four hundred and fifty thousand subscribers, Clarke realized there was no turning back now. She had let the voices of the interwebs into her life—for better or for worse.

 

#

 

Clarke is fussing with her tripod when there’s a sharp knock on her door. She’d know that knock anywhere. There’s a particular rhythm to the rap of his knuckles that reminds her of a soldier reporting to his commander. Sharp and quick.

She yanks open the door. “Perfect timing. I was just about to film a q and a.”

Bellamy fills her doorway so wonderfully, like a painting in a frame. Clarke takes a moment to appreciate the symmetry of _A Study in Blake_. The chaos of black curls, the firmament of freckles, the broad sloping lines of his shoulders, a dimple pressed into his chin like a thumbprint. He’s a gesture drawing waiting to happen. 

She asked him once if he ever planned on signing up as a model for her figure drawing class—they pay quite well, and Bellamy always needs cash—but he flushed a fascinating shade of fuchsia and responded with a slightly choked _When hell freezes over_.

Now Bellamy’s dark eyes dart toward the camera uncertainly. “I should definitely come back later.”

“Please stay. I can make it a Bellamy-themed q and a. There are almost more questions for you than for me anyway.”

“I never know how to answer those. Your followers always ask about my biceps. ”

“They know what’s important.”

But she sees the white box in his hands labeled Dropchip Bakery, and there’s no way she’s letting him escape now. “You can’t bring a girl pie and leave. Unless of course that’s not pie. Which would be dangerous.”

“Of course it’s pie.” He hands her the box. It’s still warm, and she closes her eyes and inhales deeply. Boysenberry. “And this time I didn’t let Jasper add anything, uh, extra special.”

She rolls her eyes and drags him into her dorm room, which feels a whole lot smaller now he’s inside it. Raven’s half is wildly messy, gaming consoles and science textbooks piled haphazardly. Clarke’s is almost obsessively tidy, with a woodsy green comforter, twinkling fairy lights, and a bookshelf. The only bit of artistic freedom she allows herself is the collage of postcards, sketches, and polaroids taped in a swirling composition to the wall. Her own personal galaxy.

Bellamy helped her decorate when she moved into her sophomore dorm a month ago, gamely guest-starring in her Moving Day vlog. It turned out he’s adorably terrible at decorating. While attempting to hang the fairy lights, the fine copper strands tangled in the mess of his hair, and Clarke was forced to free them while he grew increasingly frustrated and she tried not to laugh. It’s her most popular vlog in months.

Laughter is still a weird new thing for her.

It’s a stark contrast to last year, and her narrow single room with the lone picture frame she’d hung up by herself. No Wells to take her out to that celebratory lunch, like they’d planned, no Dad to help her lug in her books, and her mom already headed for the airport and the OR.

But this year, there’s a Bellamy sitting next to her on the bed beneath a halo of lights, eyeing the camera like it’s an enemy in battle.

“I should call O,” he says. “I’m sure they’d rather see her.”

Bellamy’s younger sister, Octavia, a new freshman, is wildly popular with Clarke’s commentariat, to a degree that frankly baffles Clarke. She’s only featured in two of Clarke’s videos so far, but every third comment seemed to be people asking her how she got her eyebrows so on fleek, a term Clarke had to look up. For a person who spends half her life on the internet, Clarke is remarkably unhip. Sometimes her commenters call her “mom”. She had to look that up too.

“You’re the better Blake,” she says, bending to switch on the camera.

A smile tilts his lips for the briefest moment, like he’s surprised.

“Hello, Youtube!” Clarke smiles into the lens. “As you may have noticed, I have with me a very special guest, back by popular demand.”

Bellamy grimaces, but she can tell he’s amused. He’s a stoic guy, it’s true, but he’s not nearly as stoic as he thinks.

She elbows him. “Face it, Bellamy. The public adores you. Without you, there’d be no PrincessClarke100.”

It’s not an exaggeration. Back at the start of freshman year, Clarke and Bellamy were partnered on a massive group project in poli sci. To say they got off on the wrong foot would be a gargantuan understatement. By the end of the period, the rest of the students in their group were cowering in their seats as Clarke and Bellamy tore into each other, each insult more vicious than the last.

Then Bellamy made the grave error of calling her _princess_ in just about the most condescending tone Clarke had ever suffered. Clarke’s response got them both thrown out for the day.

Clarke stomped back to her dorm, fuming, wishing more than anything she had someone to vent to. So she flipped open her dad’s camera and ranted about the awful boy who had the gall to talk down to her, whom she wouldn’t choose as a partner for anything even if they were the last people on earth. And then somehow it devolved into a tirade on feminism, and college, and starting over in life, and making your own way through the sludge and muck and blood. She uploaded it then and there, with only minimal editing and next to no forethought.

And for some ungodly reason, people watched it.

And they’re still watching.

Sometimes, if Clarke thinks too hard about it, her life becomes very creepy.

She squints at her phone, scrolling through her Tumblr ask box. “People are very disappointed we’re no longer living on the same floor. Sorry, guys. We’re actually in totally different buildings. No more awkward run-ins on the way to the bathroom.”

“Her shower caddy is sparkly and pink,” Bellamy says, “in case you’re wondering.”

“You’re not funny,” Clarke says. “Don’t try to be funny.” She turns back to the camera. “We’ll have to brave the wicked outdoors to see each other, and you know how much I hate the snow, so chances are slim that we ever spend time together again.”

“I’ll lure you with pie.”

Clarke waggles the open box in front of the camera. “This is how he bribes me. Our friendship is a sham. I’m only using him for dessert.”

“And I’m only using you for a dorm that doesn’t smell like weed and moonshine.”

Clarke snorts and turns back to her phone. “Oh, here’s a good one for you. Who would win in a fight to the death armed with nothing but foam fingers, me or Raven?”

“You,” Bellamy says instantly.

“Good answer. What about me and—”

“You. Doesn’t matter.”

She grins and keeps scrolling. And scrolling. 

“Why are you going past so many?” Bellamy asks.

“Because they’re all hideously inappropriate, as usual.”

Bellamy’s expression darkens “Inappropriate how? Like they’re harassing you?”

“No. Well, sometimes. It’s the internet. You’ve got your beat-up-the-world face on, Bellamy, unclench, it’s really okay. These questions are more…invasive, I guess.”

Her cheeks redden. Bellamy doesn’t spend a lot of time online, for which she’s very grateful. Because as Bellamy came to feature more and more prominently in her videos—as they grew from out and out enemies to fast friends on camera—the shippers among her subscribers grew louder.

A lot louder.

Which is ridiculous. There’s absolutely nothing between Bellamy and Clarke. Theirs is a platonic friendship—no, a _trust_ —founded on mutual respect, objective admiration, and the delivery of pie. Especially the pie. Of course, it took a while. Once they stopped trying to tear each other’s heads off in poli sci, and realized the best imaginary government was one borne of equal partnership and teamwork.

Then came the mutual respect.

Yes, that sounds right to Clarke. Respect. Teamwork. They do a good job taking care of their sometimes-ragged friend group together. Jasper even jokingly refers to them as Mom and Dad. Bellamy’s her teammate, and nothing more. Finito. The end.

So she’d really appreciate it if her followers would stop screaming at her to kiss him already.

The last time she’d kissed someone, it hadn’t exactly gone well.

She shifts a couple inches away from him on the bed, as casually as she can. But Clarke’s not really built for casual, and his eyes follow the movement. He frowns.

Clarke digs into the pie just to give herself something to do and decides to edit most of this out, even if it angers her viewers.

 

 **Views:** 145,657

 **Comments:** 437

**MadiK**

Omg, you are such a bellamy tease!! That was not enough bellamy!!!

**RingofFire12**

HE BROUGHT HER PIE <333

**PigfartsAlum**

Pie is dirty lol

**X_Griffinpuff_x**

Can you pls tell bellamy he looks so cute in green omg I will die if he sees this PLS CLARKE TELL BELLAMY BRAZIL LOVES HIM!!!

**BreetheAlien**

Bellarke af tho

**Kylo Ren Defense Squad**

Guys they’re just friends. Why do all boy girl friendships have to be a ship its so immature.

**DelenaxTrashx**

Go be joyless somewhere else and let the people live 

 

#

 

Clarke slips into her favorite table at Grounders, the campus coffee shop, and sets down her pumpkin spice latte, careful not to jostle the leaf etched in the foam. She never thought much of fall flavors until she moved from California to a wet, woodsy East Coast campus and actually experienced autumn for the first time. Now the moment the calendar flips to October, her life becomes cinnamon tea, pumpkin spice, and knit scarves. She always feels more creative in the fall. More collegiate, like a student in a movie.

Clarke pulls her sketchbook from her bag and flips it open to her most recent piece: a study of a bench in the quad, skirted with leaves. She places it beside her latte and snaps a pic for Instagram.

She likes the composition quite a lot considering how little she tweaked the positioning. It’s perfectly artsy and wonderfully autumnal, so she hits post.

“You could just _drink_ it, you know,” a voice says, and Raven collapses into the seat opposite Clarke in her usual _I’m here and I make no apologies for it_  way. “Honestly I think you spend more time filming your life than living it.”

“Don’t snark at the girl who bought you a double espresso.”

“Mm, dark as engine fuel, just the way I like it.” Raven shoots back a slug of piping hot espresso, then straightens her brace with a grimace. Colder weather is always harder on her leg. Clarke’s hands itch to fuss, but she’s trained herself not to. Raven’s not the kind of person who likes asking for or receiving help. It’s something the two of them have in common—aside from the human disaster that is Finn Collins. But the less said about _her_ the better.

Raven pulls out her phone. “God, Clarke, this instagram is _perfect_. How did you do that? It was just a fucking cup of coffee and now it’s art.”

Clarke shrugs, though she’s pleased at the compliment. People think social media is easy and mindless, but she works quite hard at it. Clarke works hard at everything, and it’s exhausting, truth be told. But it’s worth it. All the important things are supposed to take work. Her mother taught her that.

But sometimes, in spite of herself, she wishes something in her life could be easy. As easy as blinking, as breathing, as falling into step. Raven lives like that. She’s been through as much hardship as Clarke has, and yet she’s so unstudied—so natural and unconstructed—that Clarke envies her to a degree that frightens her.

The only unstudied thing about Clarke is her brushstrokes. Even her hair is yanked back in a tidy braid.

“Soooo.” Raven drags out the word and watches Clarke above her espresso. “I’ve been reading your comments.”

“Oh, not you too. Octavia sent me some highly inappropriate texts this morning, and I don’t want to hear it anymore.”

“It’s just so hilarious. Honestly, I think you two would make a terrible couple.”

That jolts her, though she tries to hide it. “What? Why?”

“I don’t know. You’re both so…so…”

Clarke holds her breath, for some reason.

“Hard,” Raven decides. “And not in a dirty way. More like battle-weary. Warrior princess. You know, hard.”

“Bellamy’s a warrior princess?”

“Oh god, please get him to wear that for Halloween. He’ll do it if you ask. ”

Clarke snorts. “He won’t, and I’m not asking.”

“Spoilsport. To quote the great philosopher of our age, DelenaxTrashx, ‘Go be joyless somewhere else and let the people live.’”

Clarke throws a sugar cube at her.

 

 


	2. Cupcakes, Sleepovers, and Bellamy Barnes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Study sesh, nighttime cuddles, and a Halloween party with accidentally coordinated costumes. Then the angst arrives.

Bellamy comes over to study biochem while Raven’s at the library, bearing chocolate chip cupcakes. Clarke sits prim and cross-legged at the foot of her bed while Bellamy sits with his back against the wall, feet on the floor.

The hours wear on and the light through the window fades. Their brains begin to dissolve under the onslaught of facts. Clarke flops onto her side, and Bellamy leans against her pillows, taking up far more room than he has any right to.

He looks so tall and male against her bed. So completely out of place. It’s weirding her out, seeing him engulfed by the green of her comforter. Like _Bellamy_ and _bed_ are two concepts she wasn’t prepared to see meet.

She tries to focus on the words in her notebook, but her gaze is yanked toward Bellamy time and time again.

Bellamy plays with the tasseled edge of her throw blanket, and she stiffens.

His brows knot. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re looking at me like you’re angry with me.”

“I’m not. Really. It’s just…” She closes her notebook. “Finn used to do that. With the tassel..”

Bellamy is quiet for such a long time that Clarke regrets broaching the subject.

“You never talk about her ,” he says eventually.

Clarke grimaces. “I can’t decide if that’s more for Raven’s sake than mine. Our friendship was the only good thing to come out of that. I…I still don’t know how she ever forgave me, but I’m glad.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t know Finley  had a girlfriend.”

Her eyes dart to the box of cupcakes, then away. “I know. But can you imagine how Raven felt? Deciding to transer to the same college as her high school sweetheart, only to find out she’s also dating some other girl who happens to be her _roommate?_ I’m just glad Raven understood that I never wanted to hurt her. And that Finn wasn’t worth it.”

Bellamy is silent again, but it’s the comforting kind. The kind that gives her room. Clarke’s a city girl, but Bellamy’s brand of quiet makes her understand why people go hiking in mountains all alone, searching for large, still lakes and the peace of their thoughts.  Bellamy was undoubtedly very capable in the woods. She had the sudden urge to see him by firelight.

Bellamy lifts the cupcakes off the nightstand and slides them toward her like he knows she needs one. She takes one with a grateful smile.

The clock reads 2 am, and it feels like exhaustion has erased her. She tosses her notes onto the floor, sighs, and lies down completely. “I give up, and so does my brain. I’m dropping out of college.”

“Good idea.” Bellamy shoves all the textbooks onto the floor, probably making her downstairs neighbors very happy. He lies back against her pillows. “That’s an excellent plan.”

“No, it’s not. It’s dreadful.”

“If it’s your plan, I’m in.”

“Really? Just like that?”

“Just like that. No questions asked.”

She smiles and studies a smudge of dirt in the knee of his jeans, wondering how he got it. She presses a fingertip against it.

He stiffens, and she snatches it back.

“If I dropped out, at least my mom would notice me,” she says softly.

“How could anyone not notice you?”

“She’s …It’s hard, I guess, since my dad died, for her to…see outside herself. She buries herself in that OR to keep the emptiness at bay.”

“Like mother like daughter.”

Clarke makes a face.

He shifts, sliding so there’s room for her to scoot up the bed. She sinks her head on the pillows, and they’re facing one another.

“The problem,” she whispers, “is that just leaves me to deal with the emptiness alone. And then Wells died too, which left even more empty space, and I just…”

“Just what?” Bellamy says quietly.

They’re close enough that she can feel his heat, even see his freckles in the half-light from her table lamp. Clarke is breathless, and unmoored, and suddenly it threatens to overwhelm her. The fear is sharp in her ribs. 

Clarke thrusts herself to a sitting position, scrambling for her camera. “Here. We should—we should vlog this.” She presses the power button and the red light flashes on, easing the panic in her chest like she’s slid on armor. “Hello, Youtube! Just another late night study session, guest starring Bellamy Blake. College life, ugh.”

Bellamy swallows hard and hoists a smile, sitting up onto his elbows.

But Clarke could swear he looks disappointed. 

 

#

 

Clarke is heavy with sleep, her mind swimming through warm dark water. Everything is floaty and unreal, but somewhere in the midst of it she feels Bellamy’s chest rising and falling beneath her cheek, his exhaled breaths stirring her hair. Her body is telling her to wake up because she needs to move and move _now_ , alert, alert, something forbidden and dangerous is occuring, but he’s so warm, and she’s tucked up beside him so tightly.

But the voice doesn’t shut up, and her eyes drag open.

A blanket’s been thrown over them. She squints at the star pattern and realizes it’s Raven’s. Realizes that not only is her cheek on Bellamy’s chest, but her arm is flopped over his stomach and his arm is draped across her shoulders, bracketing her in place.

She yanks herself free of him so fast and so thoroughly that she almost dies falling out of bed, taking the blanket with her. Raven snickers from across the room.

Clarke stares in horror as Bellamy stirs. But he only mumbles something and rolls into the empty space she left behind. Thank _God_.

“Did you put a blanket over us?” Clarke hisses.

“It’s cold out,” Raven says.

“You could have woken me up.”

“What, and ruin that adorableness? In the wise words of DelenaxTrashx—” 

Clarke throws the blanket at her.

Raven catches it and lifts her brows. “You can’t just hurl things at me whenever you Bellarke.” 

“Whenever I _what?_ ”

“Don’t you ever go on your own tag? Oh. Yeah, on second thought, don’t.”

 

 **Views:** 201,865

 **Comments:** 657

 

**Bananapants13**

HE’S ON HER B E D

**Anya T**

Holy SHIT

**Maya Oh Maya**

Beyond ded. BEYOND DED.

**Sansa Snark**

Tell me he slept there!!! (and more lol)

**DelenaxTrashx**

Bellarke is CANON fight me

**Leggo my eggo**

There’s no such thing as canon in real life

**DelenaxTrashx**

Fight me again

**shrektastic**

This vlog is so scripted

**Debbie Lee**

They’re real people you dumb fcking horse

**The Lost Weasley**

Guys did you see the way he looked at her when she was talking gahhh

**Nora Allen**

I want a Bellamy ☹

**BiAF**

Clarke’s pjs are so cute lol

**BellamyBlakesWife**

BELLAMY BRAZIL LOVES YOU 

 

#

 

Clarke adjusts her plastic shield as she knocks on the door of Bellamy’s suite. Already the heady blend of music and laughter is pounding through the door, and she hears Octavia’s voice rising above all the others.

The door opens, revealing Bellamy holding a plastic pumpkin full of candy, dressed as—

She laughs in delight, and a grin splits his face. He really needs to be careful how he wields that grin. It can knock a girl sideways if she’s not expecting it.

“Great minds,” he says, and his gaze sweeps all the way down her body, taking in every inch of her costume.

 His eyes land on Raven. “Rosie the Riveter?”

“Yes we can!” she says, flexing her bicep.

Clarke rolls her eyes. “That’s Obama. It’s ‘We Can Do It!’, not—”

“Whatever. I want a beer and a Snickers.” Raven pushes past her inside.

Shaking her head, Clarke follows, and Bellamy closes the door. She felt self-conscious in the close-fitting blue fabric of her Captain America costume back at her dorm. But here, surrounded by her friends, she feels herself relax.

The suite Bellamy shares with Monty, Jasper, and Miller has a large common room with a couch, an armchair, and at least five floppy bean bags tossed here and there. Clarke cracks open a beer and pulls out her camera, laughing as Monty, dressed as Harry Potter, tries to summon a bottle with his wand. Octavia, dressed as Furiosa , is loudly and passionately arguing with Jasper-as-Dr. Horrible. Clarke sees Bellamy hovering nearby, poised like he’s three seconds from intervening. Clarke nearly laughs, not sure if he’s protecting Octavia from Jasper or Jasper from Octavia.

Clarke drinks another beer and it warms her from the inside out. She takes the camera all around the room, capturing Miller in his zombie makeup dancing to the Monster Mash, catching Harper in her red Ginny Weasley wig smiling up at Monty in a way Clarke recognizes even from here.

Murphy and Emori pull her into a rousing game of beer pong, which she wins handily, much to Raven’s delight. Murphy makes a snarky joke, and Raven snarks back even harder, and Clarke is laughing into her solo cup and feeling lighter than she has in weeks. Maybe months.

It’s nothing special. In fact, it’s the same people she talks to every day, just dressed a bit more stupidly. They’re all loud and sloppy and drunk, but something warm and contented has settled inside her, and it’s not the alchohol (well, not entirely). These people feel so much like home. Clarke could happily stand here alone, watching them be happy, for hours. Like a big drunk creep.

Several beers later, Clarke finds herself plopped lengthwise on the couch, watching as her friends grow more ridiculous and more adorable. Jasper and Monty are attempting to snowboard with her Captain America shield, never mind that they’re inside and there is, obviously, no snow.

Bellamy Barnes approaches, and she grins up at him far more widely than she’d normally let herself.

He lifts her feet, sits down, and places them back in his lap, one hand curled over her ankle.

“Ten bucks that Jasper slams into the wall before Monty does,” she says.

“No way. Jasper’s always the one who slams into walls.”

Clarke laughs, and his fingers tighten around her foot. His other hand is perilously close to her knee.

What is her new obsession with knees?

She likes herself drunk. It makes her feel a little less warrior-princess-hard.

Monty teeters on the shield and nearly falls over, but Harper bends to catch him by the waist.

“I think I spy a new ship brewing,” Clarke says.

“Ship?”

“You’re so elderly. Get with the times, Grandpa.”

“This from the girl who doesn’t know ‘fleek’.”

“I’m too young to know fleek. Nobody even says that anymore.”

Bellamy shakes his head and takes a deep swig of his beer bottle. He knows better than to sample Monty’s invented concoction, which is bright green and tastes like rotten algae.

Clarke sees Octavia pull out her phone and press it to her ear before heading outside. Bellamy’s eyes track his sister, lingering on the closed door before drifting back to Clarke.

She likes his eyes on her. He has a very physical gaze. She can feel it as surely as his hand on her ankle.

Clarke leans her cheek against the cushion and lets her gaze fully explore him. His shoulders look broader than usual in his Winter Soldier costume. His hair is more tousled than ever, and his posture is relaxed.

She likes him drunk, she decides. He smiles when he’s drunk, and Bellamy should smile. It throws his features into near-Da Vinci alignment. He’s the Golden Ratio.

“Why don’t you ever let me draw you?” she asks.

Bellamy’s eyes widen. “Naked?”

“No!” She nudges him with her foot. “Just…you know.” She lifts a hand, squinting one eye shut and tracing the outline of his cheek in the air. “Swoopy line here. Across there. Angle there. Swoopy swoop.” 

“Are those the technical art terms?”

Sometimes she forgets how deep his voice is. She talks to him every day, and yet still it manages to startle her.

She can’t look away from his eyes. They’re so dark they feel a bit like they’re swallowing her. “I like the swoopy swoop.”

“If you like it, then I like it.”

She must be completely out-of-her-skull drunk, to the point of hallucinating. Because there’s no way he can be looking at her like…

Like…

“Bellamy?” she says, so soft it’s an exhale.

His lips form her name, but it’s lost to the music. She feels his thumb stroke along her foot.

And he’s looking at her like—

“Bellamy.”

It’s Octavia, standing over them. Tears carve through her Furiosa makeup. 

He’s on his feet at once. Clarke misses him immediately. 

“What is it?” When she doesn’t answer, Bellamy grabs his sister’s shoulders. “O, what is it?”

“It’s Mom.” Octavia’s voice cracks. “She’s sick. Really sick. We need to go home.”

Someone has either the good or the terrible sense to switch off the music, and the silence is painful.

“Come on.” Bellamy scoops his sister’s coat from the armchair and slides it onto her arms. “I’ll take you back to your dorm.”

“Bellamy—” Clarke starts, trying to get to her feet, but the Blakes are already gone, and the party is definitely over.

 

 


	3. The Hug Heard Round the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaaaaaaaangst. And then a late Christmas present.

The Blakes book their train tickets for the next day.

Clarke doesn’t know how to help them. She wants to so much it’s a constant ache in her stomach and a tightening in her throat. She wants to tell them that she knows what it’s like to lose a parent, but what if that’s the exact wrong thing to say? Because their mother isn’t dying—she _isn’t_ , she _can’t_ —but what if she is? Or what if Bellamy and Octavia aren’t even _thinking_ that way, and then Clarke puts the thought in their heads? 

It’s all so awkward and everything is terrible.

Aurora is a single mother. She’s all Bellamy and Octavia have.

Clarke thinks about calling her own mother, and doesn’t, and feels colossally selfish.

Neither Bellamy nor Octavia has a car, so Clarke offers to take them to the train station. Octavia sits sullenly in the back seat, angry at everything. Bellamy rides shotgun, his jaw like stone and his eyes like murder.

Clarke drives silently, not even daring to turn on the radio. The Blake siblings are so _ferocious_ when they’re in pain.  It’s frightening. But she knows them well, and knows that two dangerously sensitive hearts lie underneath that armor. One wrong movie and permanent damage could occur.

_Say something, Clarke. Damn it._

Clarke eyes Bellamy uneasily. She knows his propensity for self-destructiveness, especially when he’s in pain. She fights to pull the words from the back of her throat to the tip of her tongue. She wants to tell him not to destroy himself, that it’ll be okay, that she’s here for him, but somehow she never says them.

Clarke pulls up to the station and parks at the curb.

Bellamy steps out. “O, I’ll carry your—”

“No,” she growls, snatching her bag back and charging into the terminal in a blink. Clarke looks away from Bellamy, giving him a moment, staring awkwardly at the toes of her boots.

The silence stretches, and Clarke gets the suspicion he’s lingering on purpose.

Bellamy pulls out his wallet. “Let me pay for gas.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s my—” She bites back the word _pleasure_ just in time, because honestly? _Pleasure? Gah, Clarke._

“I have to pay,” he insists, almost angrily, and Clarke understands. He needs to be able to contribute. To control something.

“Okay,” she says, and takes his cash. Their fingers brush.

The urge to hug him is overwhelming. Her nerves scream at her to do something. Anything. He’s standing on the curb like he wants to fight everyone and everything, including her, or especially her. But maybe, if she just found the right words, or figured out a way to get her awkward, stupid arms to do _something—_ say something sympathetic or even—

But she can’t. She can’t comfort him. It’s tapping into a well in her heart she’s buried under miles and miles of protective rock. So she just watches as he hauls his bag over his shoulder and follows his sister inside.

She feels colossally selfish.

 

#

 

November is gray and soggy, and the Blakes don’t come back.

Clarke throws herself into her vlog and into her finals with a vengeance, studying to the point of mania, until even honor roll Raven grows worried and has to remind her when to nap and eat.

Clarke throws a ten second explanation into one of her videos telling her viewers that there’s been a Blake family emergency and the siblings have gone home for the rest of the semester. That it’s their business, stay out of it, be nice, let’s move on.

She doesn’t mention the Blakes on camera again.

Clarke flies home for Thanksgiving. She shares a terrible dinner with Abby as they fail once again to breach the gulf Dad left behind.

She flies back east on Sunday, landing in the first snow of the year, and the Blakes are still not back.

Clarke demolishes her finals with the focus of a tiger. The snow reaches her ankles, and she tries not to think about whether or not Bellamy would still brave the elements to bring her pie.

The semester ends.

She flies west to her huge empty house, where there is no snow. And no friends. And no Blakes.

Her vlogs over winter break are almost embarrassingly emo, but Clarke can’t help it. Being back in her hometown without Wells or her dad is unbearably lonely, and Abby is practically living in the OR. It feels more and more like college is home and her friends are her family, and she misses them so badly she can’t bear it.

She manages to get Bellamy on the phone exactly once, but he’s so terse she might as well be squeezing a tree for information. She texts him and gets nothing but crickets. Octavia is the one who keeps her updated by email throughout winter break, and Clarke finds herself living for each new message in her inbox. She feels herself lighten in relief as the news about Aurora gets better every time.

Clarke decides she needs a project.

She sends the Blakes care packages. Lots of them. An embarrassing number, really, but she’s going to go completely mad if she can’t help in some fashion. He won’t answer her texts? Well, _fine_. She’ll get out all her mothering, nesting, healer energy by sending him candy canes and not-funny cards she drew herself and a veritable onslaught of baked goods (she’s a wretched baker; they’re store bought).

Still he doesn’t text her back.

Finally it’s time to go home.

 

#

 

She’s the first one back at the dorm. She unpacks her suitcase, folding every sock, then sets up the camera and sits on her bed.

“Well, I’m back. Finally.” She tries to smile. “Everything feels a bit weird without…um, people. But oh, man, I missed the snow and the woods. I never thought I’d say that, but it’s true--I did. Hopefully I’ll be a lot less gloomy now that I’m back where I belong. As much as I ever feel that way. I’m still kinda searching.”

She drops her gaze to her lap, fingering the run in her jeans.

“I know I’ll never not be a gloomy worrywart. That’s just me.” Clarke sighs. “Sometimes I wish I was a less serious person. But, you know, there’s something to be said for being serious. For being in control of yourself. Those are the kinds of people who end up ruling the world, after all. They also take the most shit, but that’s because they can. We’re hardened for a reason. ”

She tries to take a breath, but it’s more difficult.

“So, yeah. Lesson of the day, kids: control yourself. Keep a good wrangle on those messy bits, and don’t let them define you. You’re more than your raw edges and emotions and weaknesses. Overcome them .”

She stares into the red eye of the camera.

There’s a sharp, quick, soldier’s knock on the door, and Clarke’s entire body freezes.

The door cracks open.

“Sorry,” Bellamy says, “I heard you talking to your camera, so I figured—”

Clarke catapults across the room.

She launches herself into his arms so hard the breath leaves her as she slams against his chest. It’s an explosion of instinct. For a moment, he’s still with shock. Her heart doesn’t know where to go. And then there’s a glorious crush as his arms seize her, wrapping all the way around her, so tight she’s lifted onto her toes. He half laughs into her hair, and she buries her face in his shoulder. 

She pulls back slightly so she can get a good look at him, and though his eyes are shadowed, he’s smiling.

Clarke’s heart thumps hard.

“Where’s my attack hug?” says an amused voice.

Clarke breaks from Bellamy in surprise. She didn’t even notice Octavia. “Of course. I’m so glad you guys are here.” She folds Octavia in an embrace, but she’s painfully aware of her limbs. Why is she so bad at hugging?

It doesn’t matter. Octavia is laughing, and Bellamy is here. Her Blakes are back, looking beautiful and battle-worn as only they can.

Beaming, Clarke runs to the camera.

“We’ll talk later,” she says to the lens. “Right now, I need to catch up with my friends.” She switches it off.

 

 **Views** : 331,980

 **Comments:** 1,256

 

**DelenaxTrashx**

BELLARKE IS REAL!!!!!!!!

**Sophia A**

Im sobbing I’m dead

**Annie Elliot**

This is the best day of my life

**Malec Forever**

BELLARKE RISING

**StarshipKid**

MY SHIP MY SHIP

**Amy M**

Omfg my heart just STOPPED I’m not breathing I swear

**Gangsey Squad**

Guys GUYS did you see his hands in her hair and *he closed his eyes* like he was just breathing her in asjksdfd;kls

**Bi Bi Bi**

The Hug Heard Round the World

**Bellarke100**

HER FACE. WHEN SHE RECOGNIZED. HIS KNOCK.

**ClaireBear**

She hugged him like she was dying omfg my babies

**Bellamys Princess**

Link to my Bellarke fanvideo pls watch!! 

**Freddie Tran**

Im so glad I woke up at 2 am for this but how am I supposed to go to school now 

**Beatrice Duke**

600 TIMES WATCHED IS NOT ENOUGH

  **ProjectBC**

Hey Bellarkers, don’t know how many of you are going to see this comment, but if you do…you may just want to follow the link to our channel. We have some VERY reliable inside sources, I guess you could say, with lots of insight. And a plan. MWAHAHA. *waggles eyebrows mysteriously*

 

#

 

Why, why, _why_ didn’t Clarke cut out that damn hug?

The view count is rocketing up by the second, and there are so many comments that Clarke immediately gives up trying to follow them. But the ones she can see are so hideously embarrassing she decides right then and there never _ever_ to mention this to Bellamy. EVER.

She watches the hug again, and her cheeks burn. God, she really _flung_ herself at him. Like a lioness on some poor unsuspecting gazelle . What is _wrong_ with her? Why is she so bad at human-ing like a normal person? Why is she so _intense?_

She’s never had any chill. It’s one of the things she likes best about Bellamy, in fact—that he has as little chill as she does. But right now, she’d give anything to be able to take it down at least ten notches. No wonder she’s so tired all the time.

She watches it again. There’s a moment where he’s so stunned that his arms just hang there, and then they _wrap_ around her, firmly and surely and quickly and solidly and so many other adverbs that Clarke forgets how words word. She feels something strange grip hold of her lungs. She fits so well against him. Like she was carved in the same knife stroke as him, and he’s her negative space.

Clarke shoves herself away from her laptop and closes YouTube at once.

What the hell is the matter with her?

“Enough,” she says out loud to her empty room. “I am not a thirteen year old Bellarke fangirl. I’m _me_. I can’t be a fangirl of _me_. I’m a pre-med, sane, reasonable, adult human. _I am not doing this_. ”

She stares at her browser in defiance.

Then she goes on Tumblr.

Raven warned her not to search the Bellarke tag, but some kind of morbid curiosity, some masochistic, gnawing urge, is drawing her there. It’s a shock to see how much content there is. Text posts and gif sets. God, the gif sets. Every moment she’s ever shared on screen with Bellamy has been cut up and preserved.

She lingers on one post. It’s an analysis of several times Clarke and Bellamy have made, in the words of belllamys-princess-100, “significant eye contact.”

For a second, Clarke is immensely creeped out. What the fuck, belllamys-princess-100? Who gave you the right to zoom in and slow down on Clarke’s _face?_ That face did not belong to you! Zoom in on your own face!

But Clarke finds herself studying the many, many gifs of Bellamy, the slow sweep of his lashes as his dark eyes look over her with such _focus_ it’s almost like they’re painting her. She watches the slow motion curve of his smile and the crinkle of his eyes.

She’s not breathing .

She finds a gifset of The Hug. They call it that, The Hug, like it’s the only hug in the world, and as she watches herself thud into Bellamy’s arms, over and over, she starts to think that it may be true. Maybe this really is the only hug in the world.

She can’t stop looking at the precise way his hands fit around her. And the way his eyes press shut. And his hand in her hair. And just…him.

 _Fuck_.

 


	4. The Dark Side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Powdered donuts and crossing over to the darkside...by entering your own fandom.

Clarke can’t act normal around him. 

She’s sure he’s noticed. He’d have to be an idiot not to notice, and Bellamy is many things, but stupid isn’t one of them. Clarke can barely look at him. She goes out of her way not to be alone with him, leaving group lunches early, even bailing on movie night at his suite, claiming to have a test the next day. She excuses herself from lunches, from study groups, form casual hangouts.

It’s all so _fraught_.

She hates it. Stupid YouTube and stupid Tumblr have ruined her perfectly good friendship with their stupid _ships_. Because now, whenever she looks at him, she can’t help picturing them…as a ship. God, no. It’s too weird. And so…vulnerable.

Clarke isn’t good at vulnerable. She’s a hell of a lot better at sharing her feelings with the internet than with herself.

Which is ridiculous, of course. Because she doesn’t have feelings. Not for Bellamy. Not for anyone. She’s letting her viewers’ voices feed too much into her personal life. She’s just… seeing what they want her to see. She got swept up in the Tumblr-mania, the obsessive edits. She drank her own Koolaid. She invaded a fan space not meant for her, and it went to her head.

Her real life is _hers_. Separate. Safe.

With her dad’s camera, she gets to present herself any way she wants. Vlog Clarke is a lot tidier than the actuality of her life. It’s not surprising they’d get the wrong idea off the teeny snippets she polishes for them. Bellamy is indecently handsome, intelligent, brave, and loyal, with a big Gryffindor heart and a jaw that could cut glass. He bears baked goods. He drops mythology references as easy as breathing, and she keeps bringing him on camera. Of course they’re going to ship it. It’s only human.

It doesn’t mean anything.

Just because they’re all swooning does not mean she is.

 

#

 

Clarke is barricaded in her room, eating powdered donuts and watching _Grey’s Anatomy_ beneath at least four blankets, when Bellamy’s knock sounds.

Clarke squeaks and throws a blanket over her head.

“Clarke, I can hear your Netflix through the door. Can I come in?”

She debates pretending to be Raven for a full second longer than is sane. Quickly she brushes powdered sugar off her lips and tests her ponytail. It’s a disaster.

“Sure,” she says, and practices her smile. It feels spectacularly wrong.

She swore she used to be a person.

Bellamy steps inside, his coat unbuttoned and flapping open. Her gaze zeroes in at once on the planes of his chest. Her gaze is a traitor. 

He frowns. “Are you sick?”

“What? No.”

“Then why are you in bed?”

“It’s Saturday.”

“You’re eating donuts in bed.”

“It’s _Saturday_.”

“You’re eating donuts in bed and watching _Grey’s Anatomy_.”

“ _It’s Saturday_.”

“Clarke.” He sits on the edge of her bed, inches from her feet, and she sucks in her breath. “What the hell is the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m just doing what normal college students do on Saturdays.”

“You hate packaged junk food. You hate being lazy. And you hate inaccurate medical dramas. What’s wrong?”

“Oh. Um, I _am_ sick.” Clarke shoves the donuts away and tries that smile again. It makes her feel like an alien. “Thank you for checking on me.”

Bellamy still looks confused, and confused looks adorable on him.

Damn it.

“Did I do something?” he says.

Clarke sits up so straight that the powdered donuts get knocked sideways, vanishing into the mess of her blankets. “What? No!”

“But you’re mad at me.”

“I’m not. I promise. I’m just…stressed about school. And life.”

Bellamy watches her like he’s searching her, trying to see to the very bottom of her, which is an absolutely terrifying thought, and finally nods. “I get that. I get stressed about life too.”

Guilt strikes her. She is such a crap friend. Aurora is doing really well, but of course Bellamy is still a wreck over it, and here Clarke is making him think she’s angry with him. It’s the last thing he needs.

“Have you ever seen _Grey’s Anatomy?_ ” she says.

His eyes narrow, assessing, as if wondering whether she’s joking or not. “One or two episodes, maybe. O went through a phase.”

“Do you want to watch? I’m only on season one. I could catch you up.”

The faintest corners of his lips tick up. “Sure.”

He stands, and she scoots over to make room.

“Should I order some real food?” he says, still on his feet.

“I’ll do it. Crap, the bed ate my phone.” She pats the blankets down and comes up empty. He turns to scan the room behind him, like maybe it’s fallen on the floor, and she sees the shape of his phone in his back pocket. “I’ll just use yours.”

She reaches and slides it free.

He goes stock-still. 

Why.

Why.

 _Why_ did she do that?

Like—like literally, that was his butt. She just touched his butt. WHY DID SHE DO THAT?

And it happened so naturally. Her hand just…reached into his back pocket as if it were her own. Her hand said, _Mine_.

Her hand is a traitor. Soon Clarke will have no body parts left that she can trust.

Her face is on fire. Quickly she Googles the pizza place and taps to dial their number, looking anywhere but Bellamy. “Um. Hi! Hi. I’d like to make an order.”

Slowly Bellamy sits on the bed beside her, sending awareness zinging through her body.

Clarke can’t help picturing this whole interaction as a gif set .

 

#

 

That night, Clarke officially crosses to the dark side, and searches out Bellarke fanfiction. 

There’s a lot. A disconcerting amount, really, and for several scandalized minutes, Clarke fears for the youth of the world. At first she can barely look at them. They’re so embarrassing that she feels like her skin is trying to escape, which is such a gross image that Clarke actually has to close her laptop for a few moments and take deep breaths.

“It’s just fiction,” she whispers. She chose a night where Raven was sleeping over at Zeke’s, because no way could she make this huge mistake with any kind of audience. The world must never know. “It’s not actually you. Don’t picture it as you.”

So at first, she doesn’t. She pretends it’s some made up person who happens to have her name, and she finally has the courage to click open a few adorable and innocuous coffee shop AUs. The Clarke who works happily at Starbucks (“Over my dead body,” Clarke mutters) is nothing like her, so she has no problem picturing some alternate Clarke with far fewer emotional issues wiping counters and making espressos (the author of the fic doesn’t seem to have much of an idea of what a Starbucks employee actually does, but since neither does Clarke, she decides not to worry about it. That doesn’t seem to be the point of fan fiction.)

But Clarke can’t help but picture _her_ Bellamy, _real_ Bellamy, in every story she reads.

She doesn’t know why. She really doesn’t want to. But there’s something so believable about these idealized storybook Bellamys. Even the fic where she’s Sherlock and he’s Watson, even though her Bellamy’s the one with the Sherlockian curls and the love of mystery novels. Even the fic where they’re ragged survivors of a post-apocalyptic hellscape where everybody seems to die a lot. She’s really glad she doesn’t live in that one, Her life is bleak enough.

But then.

Then there are the sexy ones.

Clarke knows she’s a bit of a grandma when it comes to…well, everything. But she knows what fanfiction is like. She’s not _completely_ out of it. She expected sex scenes. But she’s still not remotely prepared for stories about her and Bellamy trapped in elevators or snowed into winter cabins. Stories where Bellamy pulls her into supply closets. Pulls off her shirt. Pulls off her thong.

She nopes out of that one really quickly.

Her breathing is shallow, and her hands are trembling. Her blood feels too hot. Clarke shakes her head like she’s clearing water from her ears.

“It’s just a story,” she says out loud. Her face is prickling with heat.

She should stop right now. She really, _really_ shouldn’t do this.

 _Just one more_.

This one is labeled, so she knows there’s going to be sex. She holds her breath, but it’s not as shocking as the others she noped out of at the first mention of a private part. The story is sweet and slow, and starts with Bellamy bringing her pie, which makes Clarke smile. She leans closer to her laptop screen and forgets that she’s reading. She’s melted into the story. Following in a daze as the fictional Bellamy feeds her pie, and they lock eyes, and then lips are meeting and fingers are catching and Bellamy is lowering her onto the bed, and hands are skimming the smooth, sloping skin of her lower back, and his name is on her tongue and his mouth is soft against the curve of her throat, and his pants are a heap on the floor of her dorm and what was once two separate beings, two heads and two hearts, are suddenly not even a little bit separate _at all_.

The story ends.

Clarke is breathing heavily, and there’s a treacherous current of something electric and forbidden running through her veins. Her pulse beats, low in her belly. Lower. Insistent as a drum.

She swallows. Hard.

Clarke realizes that somewhere along the way, she stopped picturing a made-up, non-Clarke. In her mind, the person Bellamy was tangled up—inside of— _melting_ —was her.

 


	5. Gryffindor vs. Slytherin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Project BC begins in earnest.

Clarke has been stuck in a bio lab for four hours, and by the time she emerges, her shoulders are sore and the sky is wet and sour. She doesn’t miss much about California, but she does miss the sun. She’s feeling downright grumpy as she plods through the puddles, wishing she could hole up in her dorm room and ignore the world some more.

But she promised Raven she’d stop sulking. And she promised Harper she’d come to her girl’s night-get-together-whatever-thing. They’re going to order Chinese and watch something without even an ounce of substance, and Clarke is glad—both for the lack of substance and the lack of boys. She’s tapped out on both fronts, and the last thing in the world she’s ready for is a night of Bellamy Blake.

Which is why, _of course_ , the first thing she sees when she pushes through the double doors of Harper’s building is a freckled, dark-haired persona non grata.

She comes to such an abrupt stop that her wet soles skid on the linoleum. “What are _you_ doing here?”

“Warm welcome.”

“It’s not—I, um, was told this was a girl’s thing. No boys.”

Bellamy raises his brows. “Are we in third grade? I didn’t know you’d put up a sign in the treehouse. I’ll take my cooties somewhere else.”

“ _No_ ,” Clarke says, annoyed. Sarcastic Bellamy annoys her. “That’s not what I meant. Be my guest. I hope you enjoy watching the _The Bachelor_ or whatever it is Harper has planned.”

“ _You’re_ watching _The Bachelor?_ ”

Clarke would rather eat glass than watch even the opening credits (did _The Bachelor_ have opening credits?), but she was grouchy and stubborn enough to ignore this.

“Clarke,” Bellamy says, sounding tired, before she can snap back. “I’m not here for girl’s night. I’m meeting Monty.”

Clarke feels a bit foolish.

“Oh,” she says.

“Yeah. Oh.” He frowns at her. “Your neck hurt, or something?”

“What?”

“You keep wincing and rolling your shoulders.”

“I just sat at a lab bench for four hours.”

“Ahh,” Bellamy says, like that explains something. A small, almost secret smile curves his lips, and he heads for the stairs without a word.

She follows, still annoyed but no longer sure what about.

Bellamy knocks on Harper’s door. It swings open at once, and Harper grins at them, far more widely than is reasonable. “Yes! Right on time. I mean, Monty’s not here yet, but both of you come in. You’re the first one here, Clarke.”

Clarke and Bellamy exchange a slightly baffled, mostly suspicious look.

“Yeah, no. No two-person telepathic conversations in front of me.” Harper tugs them inside.

Harper’s an RA this year, which means she gets to live in a single, something Monty is very grateful for and Clarke is often jealous of. But she knows if she had a single, she’d never come out of it. Besides, this room is tin-can small. Harper’s made the best of it, but there’s barely room for the three of them. When Raven and Emori get here, they’ll have to squish onto the bed like sardines.

Bellamy takes up an ungodly amount of space without even trying. Clarke finds it very rude of him, and presses against the cinder block wall to avoid touching a single molecule of Blake.

To Clarke’s surprise, Bellamy seems to be doing the same. He’s practically standing in Harper’s closet.

Harper’s phone buzzes. “Oh. Sorry guys, I’ll be right back. Just hang tight in here, okay?”

“Tight’s one word for it,” Bellamy says dryly.

Clarke’s heart slams against her ribcage.

“Seriously, I’ll just be a sec. Don’t go anywhere.” Harper’s smile is suspiciously wide as she steps outside.

It’s dead silent. Silent enough that Clarke catches the telltale click of the lock.

Bellamy’s head whips around. “Did she just lock us in here?”

Clarke tries the door handle. It doesn’t budge.

“Well,” Bellamy says evenly “Shit.”

Clarke can’t look at him. Her face feels numb and hot, and her mind is spinning back to a certain fic she read in the dead of night that began suspiciously like this. And then she stops thinking of that _at once_ , because it one hundred percent ended with them naked, and no way is she going to imagine fictional sex with Bellamy when he’s standing less than four feet away. Not when he’s always been so dangerously good at reading her mind.

She’s gone through all that trouble of building up walls and translating her thoughts basically into hieroglyphics, and damn Bellamy Blake was somehow born with the ability to crack her code without even trying. It isn’t fair. She didn’t asked for that.

“This is weird, right?” Bellamy says. “Harper was being weird.”

Clarke digs out her phone and sends said weirdo a text.

 

 **Clarke:** Um, you locked the door? Wtf??

 **Harper:** I did?!? Omg, I’m sorry! It was instinct! I lock the door whenever I leave so the freshmen don’t steal from me. even when I go to the bathroom.

 **Clarke:** Can you come back and spring us?

 **Harper:** Sorry. 10 minutes. Meeting my lab partner to exchange notes

 

“She’s not coming back, is she?” Bellamy says, reading Clarke’s expression.

He needs to stop doing that.

She sighs. “Not so much. Apparently it was an honest mistake, but I don’t think this coffin of a room has ten minutes of oxygen in it. She’ll feel really bad when she has to drag our asphyxiated corpses out of here.”

Bellamy gives her a startled look. “You really are having a day, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Gallows humor is usually my thing.”

She sighs again and plops onto Harper’s bed. “I don’t know. I just feel…off. Unsettled.”

Bellamy folds himself onto the four square feet of floor, back against Harper’s desk, feet flat on the floor, elbows resting on knees. “What’s unsettling you?”

She meets his gaze and doesn’t answer. She looks away fast.

They’ve been closer than this. They’ve slept in the same bed, for god’s sake. But something about being _trapped_ in a space with him, with no escape route, no camera, no anything, is just…

The air feels thick, and she swears she can hear his heartbeat, which is ridiculous. But maybe Bellamy’s heart is just that powerful. She’s often suspected it of being superhuman.

Bellamy tips his head back, exposing his Adam’s apple, and closes his eyes. He looks tired, too, and she feels a twinge of guilt. She’s doing it again. Wrapping herself up in—well, herself.

“What’s unsettling _you_?” Clarke asks.

His eyes flash open. “That obvious, huh?”

“To me.”

He doesn’t quite smile, but his mouth softens. “To you, huh.”

“Let me guess,” says Clarke. “Octavia.”

“How’d you know?”

She smiles. “It’s always Octavia.”

“Used to be.” He clears his throat. Rumples his hair. “O’s acting out. All this stress over our mom—I mean, I get it. And I know I protect her too much, so she lashes out. But I don’t want her to hurt. Plus there’s this guy—”

“Oh, man. That must be killing you.”

Bellamy almost laughs. “I’m trying to be bigger than that. But she’s also going so damn hard in her mixed martial arts that she’s black and blue. You know she nearly fractured her hand last week? She won’t tell me how, but I recognized those scrapes. She punched a wall. A _wall_.”

Clarke leans toward him, her voice soft. “And how many walls have you punched, Bellamy?”

The question throws him. “I…I don’t want her to be like me.”

Her heart pinches with pain so acute that she slides off the bed to join him on the floor. Their knees touch as she mirrors his posture, her back resting against the bed, feet on the floor. “That’s not a bad thing, to be like you. It’s not a bad thing at all.”

Bellamy looks at her like she’s insane. “You want her to destroy herself every time she feels pain? Punching walls and—and shoving people away? I don’t want her anything like me.”

“Okay, but you also are the most loving, protective person I have ever met,” Clarke says before she can stop herself. “You’re like a Gryffindor lion in human form. You take care of the people you love and never take care of yourself. You risk so much of yourself every day. And it’s _brave_ , Bellamy. Octavia should know how lucky she is to have you. She’ll come around and see how special you are.”

Something flickers in Bellamy’s gaze, and his jaw clenches.

In the silence, Clarke hears her words again. She wraps her arms around herself and gives a dry laugh. “Would you rather Octavia was like me? The poster child of repression? I may not be punching walls—”

“But you’re building them,” Bellamy says, and when she glances at him, his eyes are shut.

For some reason, that makes her want to cry. She swallows the hard lump in her throat and goes for lightness. “Of course, that will make me an excellent supervillain one day. In the inevitable Gryffindor-Slytherin war, you’ll be forced to eliminate me for the good of the wizarding world.”

“No way,” Bellamy says. “I’m on your team.”

“But I’m the bad guy.”

“I’d still be on our team.”

It’s a stupid thing to smile about, but she can’t help it. He knocks his knee against hers on purpose, and she feels that touch through her whole body.

“You don’t really think you’re a supervillain, do you?” he says quietly.

Her cheeks glow. “I…I don’t know. Sometimes I worry I’m…”

_Cold. Alone. Aloof. Scary._

“Would a supervillain drive her friends to the train station?” Bellamy says, an almost urgent edge to his voice. “Would she spend hours finding and printing out the necessary research to give to Jasper to finally, once and for all convince him to go on antidepressants?”

This time Clarke can’t stop the tears from blurring her vision. She looks at the carpet.

“You fix things,” Bellamy says, with all the certainty of someone stating a gospel fact. “Everything around me seems to break apart, but at least you’re always there to bring things back to center somehow.”

“Now wait just a _minute_ ,” Clarke says sternly. “As the kids say, in this house, we love and appreciate Bellamy Blake, okay? Who else but you could have gotten Murphy to actually, you know, become a person instead of a mountain troll? That guy was a total wreck before you. And you basically raised Octavia singlehandedly when you were a kid yourself. And you’re the one who finally convinced Monty that Harper really did like him! Face it, Bellamy. You’re as big a fixer as I am. No wonder we’re both so stressed out.”

Bellamy’s brow is knit with worry. “But O—”

“Octavia is her own person. And even if she’s out there making mistakes, you need to let her. She has to make them to grow.”

“But she’s my responsibility.”

Clarke bites her lip. It isn’t the first time she’s heard Bellamy say that. She’s always found it sweet, but maybe that’s because she’s an only child with only 50% of her family remaining. She wants someone to be responsible for her, and God knows she’s always adopting more responsibility left and right. But something about the phrase feels off today.

“She’s your little sister,” she says slowly, weighing each word. “So she’ll always be someone you want—need—to take care of. But…I don’t think it’s healthy to have so _much_ responsibility, Bellamy.”

He shoots her a level look. “You’re one to talk.”

She sighs. “We should learn to be selfish.” She sits up straight. “How about this. We make a deal to do one self-serving thing every day—”

Bellamy makes a scoffing sound

“Fine, every week,” Clarke amends with a smile. “One completely, over the top self-indulgent thing. No, _selfish_. Like, Slytherin-selfish. Something that benefits no one else and is of no nutrional value, morally speaking. No self-sacrifices. Nothing. As the kids also say, _treat yo self_.”

A slow, rather breathtaking smile unfurls on his lips. Clarke suddenly wonders why she missed California sunshine when she clearly has some right in front of her. “Whatever the hell we want?”

“I mean, don’t _shoot_ anybody, but yes. Whatever the hell you want. Whatever you want most.”

He looks at her, and that muscle jumps in his jaw again.

She suddenly remembers how small this room really is.

“Clarke—”

The door bangs open.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Harper wails. “But I found Monty and Raven and Emori on the way. The gang’s all here. Who’s ready for _The Bachelor_?”


	6. Always Have a Med Kit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thickheaded. Softhearted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (smutty smutness commencing)

 

 

 **Views:** 125,607

 **Comments:** 426

 

**Ravenclaw Prefect**

Hey where is Bellamy? I feel like we haven’t seen him in a while?

**Abby Nix**

CLARKE HAVE YOU WATCHED PROJECT BC YET

**Clare Su**

\+ Abby Nix Um SHHHHH

**Princess Peach**

Clarke can we get a room tour this semester??

**Hangry Hippos**

*me waiting for Bellamy to come back * It’s been 84 years

**Lucy H**

Clarke tell Bellamy BRAZIL MISSES HIM

 

 

#

 

Clarke hears the yelling the moment she steps off the elevator.

She freezes, mere feet from Bellamy’s door. She can’t make out any words, but she recognizes Octavia’s voice. It’s so powerful it shakes the walls.

Her stomach clenches. Clarke shouldn’t interfere. It’s not her business, she doesn’t even know what they’re arguing about, but everything inside of her is telling her to get in there.

But she doesn’t move.

Until she hears the telltale _smack_ of an open palm slap.

Clarke bursts through the door, hardly aware of opening it. Octavia stands with her hand still raised, breathing hard, her eyes wild, her cheeks tearstained. Bellamy stands perfectly still. His cheek is scarlet, his jaw is stone, and his eyes—

His eyes break her heart.

“Octavia,” Clarke snaps.

Octavia whirls, blazing with emotion, and shoves past Clarke without a word. The door slams.

The silence she leaves behind is terrible, like the ruins after a natural disaster, all wasteland and debris. Bellamy stares at a spot on the carpet, and Clarke isn’t sure he even knows she’s there.

“Bellamy?”

He doesn’t hear her. He turns, and his fist flies and slams into the wall.

“ _Bellamy!_ ” Clarke leaps around the coffee table and grabs his elbow.

Bellamy stops at once. He pulls away from her, his eyes wide with surprise and a heavy dose of shame. “I didn’t see you.”

“No kidding.” Clarke reaches for his bleeding hand, but he tugs it away from her and holds it protectively to his chest.

“Let me see it,” Clarke says sternly.

“It’s fine.”

“It is _not_ fine, it just slammed into a solid wall. At least you had the good sense to hit the drywall. If you’d found the support beam, I’d be driving you to the hospital right now for a cast.”

More wasteland silence follows. He doesn’t move an inch, but Clarke manages to catch his hand and gently pull it closer.

“There was no sense involved in this,” Bellamy mutters.

“No kidding,” Clarke says, but more gently this time. Her brow knits in worry. He’s split his knuckles (and knocked a sizeable divot in the drywall), and it’s already beginning to swell. It will look positively hideous tomorrow. “I have to clean these cuts. Where’s your med kit?”

“I don’t have a med kit.”

Clarke frowns at him. “I told you guys to make a suite med kit all the way in September. I even wrote a list of what to buy.”

“We don’t have a med kit.”

She sighs. Why does she bother? “It’s fine. I have one in my book bag.”

The barest ghost of a smile tugs at his lips. “Of course you do.”

Clarke flips open her satchel and pulls out a bottle of antiseptic, cotton balls, and some bandages. “Excuse me for being prepared. Now don’t move.”

Bellamy keeps his hand obediently still in midair as Clarke soaks a cotton ball in antiseptic. He winces slightly when she presses it to the cut, but he says nothing.

Clarke is always diligent when nursing an injury, even which it’s as minor as a scraped knuckle. She likes the focus it brings her, and the way the rest of her thoughts fall away. There’s something about knowing exactly what to do, and what problem she has to solve, that is soothing. It makes the mess of a world she lives in seem solvable.

There’s something about knowing she can help people in pain.

Clarke sneaks a peek at Bellamy. He’s not looking back at her, but that muscle in his jaw is working overtime.

_What would it be like to touch it?_

So much for focus. That was certainly _not_ an acceptable thought.

The scrapes are clean, so she carefully wraps a bandage around his hand. Her fingers skim the back of his hand.

Bellamy is watching her now. Clarke can feel the pressure of his gaze. She feels him swallow and realizes he’s closer to her than she’s let him be in weeks.

She can’t for the life of her meet his gaze. What will she see there?

What is he thinking?

She clears her throat. “What were you fighting about?”

“Nothing,” Bellamy says, so fast it’s surely a reflex. There’s a beat, and his hand tenses in her grip. “Everything.”

Clarke starts to smile but hides it at once. He never could stay mad at her. And he can pretend all he likes that he doesn’t want to confide in anyone, but Bellamy can never quite help spilling his heart to Clarke. Especially when it comes to Octavia.

“There,” Clarke says. “Done.”

Neither of them moves. She’s still holding his hand in both of hers, carefully, like it may break if she grips too hard.

His gaze is entreating, almost desperate. “I’m going to lose her.”

“You’re not,” she says softly.

“I am. I haven’t been—I’ve made mistakes.”

“It doesn’t mean you deserve to be slapped.”

His expression twists.

Clarke sighs. “You’re both so similar. Thickheaded.” She taps a finger against his temple. “Softhearted.”

She rests her hand on his heart.

His chest is soft and solid, and she feels the thud of his heart against her palm. And then it thuds again, more quickly.

Clarke smiles. “Get them working in tandem and I think you could save the world.”

She knows she should drop her hand. But she can’t. Not when he’s looking at her like that. He sucks in a breath.

“Clarke—”

There’s a thundering of footsteps as Monty and Jasper burst through the door, their arms full of food, both of them laughing.

Clarke leaps away from Bellamy like he’s an electric fence.

“Oh shit,” Jasper says, looking almost panicked. “We can come back lat—What happened to the wall?!”

Monty’s eyes flick between them, his forehead wrinkling in concern. “Seriously, if you guys need a moment—”

“No,” Clarke says firmly, but there’s a break in her voice. “I was on my way out. Bellamy, put some ice on that. And you two, make sure he doesn’t punch anything else.”

She snatches up her book bag and races out before Bellamy can even say a word.

 

#

 

Clarke knows she’s in deep trouble. She can’t shake the feeling of Bellamy’s heart beating against her hand. She can’t help but wonder what he might have said if they hadn’t been interrupted.

She can’t stop thinking about the way he said her name.

_Clarke._

She’s restless and sleepless that night, and Raven isn’t there to help her through it. Normally when one of them can’t sleep, they brew herbal tea and watch something dumb on Netflix together until their eyelids get heavy. They keep each other from making those stupid late-night decisions that humans are so prone to making, like texting Finley at three in the morning. (Ughhhh.)

So there’s no one there to keep Clarke from making exactly that kind of mistake. Which is why she opens up another long and intensely smutty Bellarke fic and settles down to read the whole damn thing.

“If I’m going to hell,” Clarke murmurs, “I might as well go all the way.”

And hell is right.

Because it’s set right here, in her forest green bed, beneath her twinkling fairy lights.

Because her head is still full of the solid beat of Bellamy’s heart and the roughness of his hands.

Because it’s… _hot_.

She honestly forgets that she’s reading a story. The words flow into her mind and she forgets that she’s alone and that there isn’t a warm Bellamy tangled in her sheets, his lips hot against her neck, his fingers searching beneath her waistband. He smooths his hands up her back and eases her shirt over her head, kissing the skin that’s revealed. His fingers delve deeper, sliding, finding, and Clarke gasps and buries her fingers in his thick hair. His rhythm is insistent and sure, no hesitation, and heat builds fast in her belly, so fast it’s downright embarrassing, but she can’t stop. She’s breathless, and floating, and drowning. His eyes are dark and fastened on hers as his hand speeds up, dipping inside of her, faster and faster, and she whispers “ _Bellamy_ ,” and he buries his face in her hair as she breaks apart with a cry, her legs clamping shut.

The laptop topples to the side.

Clarke yanks her hand from her crotch. Her pulse slams in her ears, and sweat cools against her temples. Her fingers are slick and wet.

Horror rises inside her, and she shoves her laptop to the opposite edge of the bed. It’s not far enough. She scrambles out of her sheets and wipes hers shaking hand clean with a tissue.

 _Oh, God_.

How is she going to wipe her _mind?_

She closes her eyes. Makes herself breathe in, and out, and in again, and out. _Focus, Clarke_.

But she can’t.


	7. Disarm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bellamy Blake is a walking weakness.  
> And she hates it.

Clarke considers it a monumental coup every time she convinces Raven to sit down for a q and a. The process always involves a half hour of wheedling and almost always ends in bribery. So when Raven announces out of the blue that she’s bored and wants to film a video, Clarke’s antennae go right up.

She watches suspiciously from her bed as Raven sets up the camera. “What’s your angle?”

“I’m offended, Clarke. Unless you mean my _camera_ angle, in which case it’s definitely from the right.”

Clarke laughs. Raven’s so good at disarming her. “Fine, let’s go. My Tumblr inbox is overflowing even more than usual.”

“Wonder why,” Raven says.

Clarke pretends she doesn’t hear this.

She’s barely on the second question (“Really? Pancakes or waffles?” Raven snorts. “What hard-hitting journalism”) when Bellamy’s knock sounds on the door.

Clarke breaks off mid-word.

“ _Huh._ Whoever could that be?” Raven levers herself to a stand and opens the door. “Oh hey, Bellamy! What’re you doing here?”

Clarke doesn’t turn around, but she can tell from the tone of his voice exactly what kind of confused frown he’s giving her. She knows his expressions by heart.

“Uh, you texted me,” Bellamy says. “You said I left a chem book here.”

“Oh, right! You actually left it in Harper’s room. Or was it in Murphy’s? You know what, I’ll go check both and see if I can find it. You stay here with Clarke, and I’ll come back with your book.”

“That doesn’t make any—”

“Sweet! See you guys!”

Clarke twists around. Raven gives Bellamy a weird bro-like punch, scoops up her coat, and leaves in the space of two seconds. Clarke half expects to hear the click of the lock and then a villainous laugh.

Clarke feels betrayed, but she’s not sure how.

Bellamy meets her gaze. She spins back to face the camera. Her heart rockets around like a pinball.

 _Don’t picture him kissing your neck. Don’t picture his hands doing_ anything _._

_Just don’t look at his hands._

“Filming?” Bellamy asks.

“Uh. Yeah.” She glances at the lens, so rudely recording every second of this. “Um, want to take over for Raven? We’re answering silly questions. Pancakes or waffles, ninjas or pirates, that kind of thing.”

“Pirates,” Bellamy says. “No question.”

Clarke’s lips twitch. “Raven said ninjas.”

“Pirates have ships and _guns_. I’d be a pirate any day.” He sits next to her on the bed, and the space between them is narrow and electric. Her toes curl. “Plus, pirates are part of a crew. There’s a loyalty there. Being a ninja assassin’s probably really fucking lonely.”

“But you’d be untouchable,” Clarke says. “Nobody would mess with you.”

“Untouchable and lonely.”

She peeks at him. Snowflakes melt in his messy Sherlock hair, and his scarf is untied, baring the line of his throat. _Damn_ that throat. Damn his smattering of freckles and those shoulders and that dimple in his chin. It isn’t fair that one person should wield so many of her weaknesses at once.

Bellamy Blake is a walking weakness. And she hates it.

He clears his throat and gestures at the phone in her hand. “Ask away.”

“Right.” She scrolls through, but she can barely read the text. None of it registers. Her every sense is full of _Bellamy_ , and she drops her hand in a huff. “These are silly.”

“Wasn’t that the point?”

“We don’t have to answer these. I already know you prefer pancakes. The internet doesn’t care.”

A tiny smile pulls his lips. “I kind of think the internet does.”

“What do you mean?”

He looks conflicted, and like he wants to say something, but instead he takes a deep breath. “How about we just talk.”

“Talk,” Clarke says warily.

“I never did thank you for those care packages over winter break.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Yeah, I do. People don’t thank you enough for what you do. I don’t know how O and I would’ve gotten through it without you.”

“I didn’t think…” She fidgets. Clears her throat. “I mean, you never texted, or anything. I thought you didn’t like them.”

“I know. I was a total ass. I should have told you those packages meant everything, but it’s hard to admit how much things matter to you. Especially when they’re so fucking important it scares you the shit out of you.”

His eyes are so steady and dark that she can’t look away. She feels lost, and fantastically overwhelmed. A moment ago she was standing on a calm riverbank, and then the current raged up without warning and ripped her off her feet. Everything’s moving too fast. She’s not sure what they’re truly talking about, and it terrifies her.

“Bellamy…” She swallows. “I—The camera. We should—”

“Fuck the camera.”

Clarke doesn’t know what’s going on, but it’s _far_ too much. She hasn’t had time to calibrate to the rapidly changing pace of the conversation. She tries to scoot away from him, but his fingers curl around her wrist. He doesn’t exert any force—he doesn’t pull her back or pin her still—but somehow she can’t move. His hand is so warm. She inhales sharply.

And then his other hand brushes the hair from her eyes. She thinks the word _Don’t_ and the word _!!!_ all at once. Bellamy bends and kisses her.

_Kisses her._

It’s just a gentle brush of his lips against hers, but all the air is punched from her chest. His knuckles gently scrape beneath her chin, tilting it upwards. He’s so close and so _him_ that he overwhelms every one of her senses, the woodsy smell of him and the taste of his morning coffee and the way his lips part hers and it’s all so much—

Clarke freaks.

She wrenches away from him, and the room swirls in her dizziness. “Oh my god.”

“Clarke—”

“No.” She stumbles to her feet, brushing his legs as she surges toward the door. She snatches her coat from the hook and races into the hall.

She has no idea where she’s going. She can barely breathe, but somehow she’s thundering down the stairs and shrugging into the sleeves of her coat. She forgot what kissing was like. It’s been so long that her body doesn’t know how to respond to an invasion so total.

The cold air slaps her as she steps outside, searing her lungs, and she drags in a deeper breath. She feels rationality returning as her skin stings with snow. At least, she hopes. Her cheeks still smart with heat, like her stubborn blood remembers.

What was that?

_What was that?_

He’s not supposed to—Bellamy isn’t—

This isn’t supposed to happen in real life. It’s supposed to be gifsets and text posts, fan fics and AUs, not the graze of his callused palm across her cheek or his gentle mouth easing hers open and tasting like Amortentia.

Bellamy Blake is the most wonderful confusion of hard and soft she’s ever experienced.

_Weakness._

This… _thing_ was supposed to stay locked up safe and tight inside the internet. Inside her own head, where she can hide from it. It’s meant to stay small enough that she can visit when she needs it, but it’s leashed so there’s no chance of it crushing her. He’s not supposed to—

“ _Clarke_.”

She nearly slips on the icy path.

_He’s not supposed to chase her._

Bellamy breathes hard as he approaches her, like he’s run the whole way. Snowflakes dust the dark shoulders of his coat. She opens her mouth, prepared to be sharp.

He kisses her so hard that at first, just for a moment, she thinks he’s angry. His hands thrust into her hair. There’s nothing soft about his lips now. They’re urgent. Reckless. Shock blasts through her, and her knees nearly give out.

But then his arms fold around her, bracing her lower back, crushing her so their hips are flush, and she knows he’s not angry.

Angry is definitely not the word.

Heat tips through her blood and erases her brain. Her hands flatten against his chest, sliding beneath his coat, and she grips his shirt in desperate fists. Bellamy gasps against her lips, and the sound sends sparks through her long-dead nerve endings.

For what feels like the first time in her life, Clarke stops thinking.

She relinquishes control. Not to Bellamy, because he seems as little in control of this as she, but to whatever infernal force is blazing awake in her blood and making her do the most impossible things, like opening her mouth to him and letting his tongue sweep between her lips. His hands burn her as they trail down her throat, graze across her scalp, and, _oh god_ , press in to the notches at the very tops of her thighs, lifting her onto her toes until there’s no space at all between them, and if Clarke keeps falling she’s going to melt right into him.

It’s so Bellamy to be the warm, sturdy force she leans against. So Bellamy for him grip her just as hard as she’s gripping him, like they’re anchoring each other down, like they’re both _hungry_. Like he’s her center of gravity. Bellamy’s thumb traces her cheekbone, and his lips slide down her jaw, and in that millimeter of distance, she sees the look in his eyes and realizes _holy shitting shit, it’s_ Bellamy _._

_IT IS BELLAMY._

_YOU ARE MAKING OUT WITH BELLAMY BLAKE IN THE MIDDLE OF CAMPUS WHERE EVERYONE CAN SEE._

_If you let him in, he won’t come out._

The lid slams shut on her feelings, and just as before but a million times worse, she staggers away from him. She expects to hear a ripping sound.

There’s a raw feeling in her lungs like she’s been running for miles. Her lips sting.

“W-what are you doing?” she stammers.

It takes a moment for Bellamy’s eyes to focus. He looks at his hands almost in confusion, like he can’t understand how they’re suddenly Clarkeless.

“What are you _doing_?” she says again.

He doesn’t answer with _Whatever it was, you were doing it too_. She’s grateful for that.

“Kissing you,” Bellamy says.

“But— _why?_ ”

“I read the comments.”

Oh fuck. Not the comments. _Not the hellos from Brazil._

“Yes,” he says grimly, reading her horror. “All the comments. I read them. And I watched our friends’ videos.”

“Our friends’ what?”

“Project BC,” he says, waving an impatient hand. “It doesn’t matter.”

“What on earth is Project—?”

“I’m tried of running from it.” He places his hands on her shoulders so she has no choice but to look at him. Hard jaw, soft hair. _A Study in Contrasts_. “I love you.”

Her breath rushes out. She feels like she’s been stabbed.

He can’t say this.

He can’t _mean_ this.

“I love you, Clarke.” He strokes her upper arms like he’s warming her. “I don’t know where loving you starts and I stop.”

“Right here,” she says, in a voice that doesn’t sound like hers. “It stops right here.”

She tugs firmly away. Pain flashes across Bellamy’s face, and her heart pinches.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes,” she says. Now that he’s not touching her, her resolve is crystallizing. “We lost control for a second. That’s all.”

“ _Lost control_.” Bellamy shakes his head in disbelief. “You were kissing me back, Clarke. You had your tongue in my mouth. You were _really_ kissing me back.”

“Hormones.” She won’t let him see her shake. She’s so afraid that the only thing she knows how to be is cold.

“Well, it’s not hormones to me.” Now he’s angry. Blakes are always ferocious when they’re in pain. Bruised knuckles and holes in walls. “It’s definitely not fucking hormones. I love you, though honestly, right now, I’m not sure why.”

That hurts so much she can barely breathe. She puts more space between them and buries her ungloved hands in her pockets. It’s so unfathomably cold without him.

When she doesn’t speak, some of his anger deflates. “I thought we were on the same page.”

“We’re not even in the same book, Bellamy.”

He lets out a broken laugh, half disbelief, half pain. “How can you _be_ like this?”

“I’m just trying to survive.”

“Maybe life should be about more than just survival.”

“Since when is that your philosophy?” Clarke feels like he’s betrayed her. She thought they were the same about this. _Hardened warrior princesses_ , and all of that. They both have fucked up pasts and solid steel armor, don’t they? He has no right to be so vulnerable, because it makes _her_ feel vulnerable back. And she can’t.

She just _can’t._

Maybe she really is a Slytherin supervillain. And they are not on the same team.

“Since I thought—” He breaks off. Huffs a hard breath. “Never mind. Do whatever the hell you want, Clarke.”

He storms off, all fire and fury, leaving her alone in the snow.

 

 

#

 

When Clarke stomps into her still life class, looking like icy murder, nobody is dumb enough to talk to her.

The professor sets up an insipid little diorama of pears and grapes, and Clarke is glad it’s not anything that requires emotion. It’s pure technique and distanced observation. How does the light hit this thing? What is the shape of this other thing? Draw this thing. Only things.

Yet somehow she breaks three separate lengths of charcoal.

“Easy hand, Miss Griffin,” the professor says when she switches to charcoal pencil and punctures the newsprint.

Clarke slashes in stark black the angriest, angstiest fruit bowl probably ever rendered. God, she hates fruit.

_I love you._

_I don’t know where loving you starts and I stop._

She hates Bellamy for stating it so bluntly, in that forthright way of his, because there’s no room to hide from that bare statement. It sits there, unadorned and unavoidable. Like that fucking bowl of fruit, it’s the only thing in the room to look at.

“Damn you, Bellamy Blake,” she mutters, resisting the urge to slash a huge X through the cluster of grapes. Wishing she could X the disaster that is Clarke Griffin right out of existence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about that.


	8. Bellamy Blake's God Damn Actual Ass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a light at the end of this angsty tunnel, and it's full-frontal nudity (though not what you think.)

Everyone is mad at her.

Nobody knows the exact details of what happened between Bellamy and Clarke—Clarke certainly hasn’t told, and she’d be shocked if Bellamy did—but her friends have got the gist. And because everything, always,  in perpetuity, seems to be Clarke’s fault, they all blame her.

She can only sort of blame them.

Jasper is particularly resentful. Clarke runs into him at Grounders, and he walks straight past her booth without even making eye contact. Clarke feels like she’s been punched in the stomach.

Harper loops a comforting arm around her shoulders. “He’ll come around. They all will.”

“All?” Clarke says, right as Raven hisses “ _Shh!_ ”.

Harper looks guilty. Raven glares daggers.

Clarke’s stomach drops. “All the guys hate me, don’t they?”

“Hate’s a strong word,” says Harper hastily. “They’re just—bummed. We all hoped—”

“ _Harper_ ,” Raven says.

Clarke shoves her coffee cup away. The barista formed a perfectly symmetrical leaf in the foam of her espresso, but she feels no desire to take a picture. She feels no desire for much of anything, truth be told.

“Guess I can’t blame them,” she says in a hard voice.

Harper and Raven exchange looks. “So what exactly…did happen between you two? All we know is that Bellamy’s walking around looking like he wants to punch some more walls—”

“He didn’t though?” Clarke says anxiously. “I mean, he hasn’t punched anything, right? He could seriously damage the bones, not to mention the nerves—”

“No, dumbass, I said _looks_.” Raven seems torn between annoyance and pity. But as she looks at Clarke a little longer, her expression softens. “Hey, I’m sorry. I forced you two to sit alone in a room together. There was this— _thing_. Called Profect BC. I honestly thought you wanted—”

Clarke gets at once to her feet. “We had a fight. People fight. I don’t want to talk about this.”

“But don’t you think we should—?”

“Nothing happened,” Clarke says shortly. “I have a paper due on Monday. I’m going to the library. Don’t wait up.”

She leaves her friends and her coffee behind and hurries out of the café into the bracing cold. She realizes she’s breathing too fast.

 

#

 

When she gets back to her dorm, very late at night, her thoughts fuzzy from hours of studying, Octavia is waiting on her bed.

Clarke glances at Raven. Raven holds up both hands in _don’t look at me_ surrender.

Octavia shoves at once to her feet. Her eyes blazing, and her shoulders are squared for battle. “What did you do to him?”

Clarke slings her book bag to the floor. “I’m tired, Octavia.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t get to be tired! You did something to him, and you need to answer for it!”

“What are you going to do, challenge her to a duel?” Raven mutters.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt him.” Clarke’s voice breaks a little. “I’m not trying to hurt _anyone_. I’m doing the best I can.”

“Well, it’s not good enough.”

“What do you want from me?” Clarke’s voice careens upward. What is it about Blakes and their ability to make her _feel_ things? She doesn’t lose control with anyone else, but these two _enormous problems_ find their way past her defenses every time. She never asked for this.

“I want you to fix it.” Octavia’s eyes flash. “Apologize, realize you’re being an idiot, I don’t care, _fix it_.”

“Because that’s what I do? I fix things?” Clarke drags her hands through her hair. “This isn’t your business. For once, this is just about _me_ , okay? I—I’m not—”

“You hurt him!”

“I wasn’t _trying_ to!”

“Hey.” Suddenly Raven’s standing between them, her hands out. “Maybe we should take it down a notch.”

But Clarke feels savage, and betrayed, and something else she can’t name. She glares at Octavia as her eyes burn with tears. “I’m not the one who goes out of her way to hurt him, Octavia. I’m not the one who takes my every emotion out on Bellamy like he’s my personal punching bag.”

Octavia sucks in a breath. Her hands tighten into fists. “Since when do you care about his feelings?”

She storms out before Clarke can answer. The door slams so hard a poster slips off the wall.

“That…was a lot,” Raven says numbly.

Clarke sinks onto her bed and stares at the carpet.

A moment later a hot mug of something is being pushed into her hands.

“Chamomile,” Raven says. “Don’t worry, I totally stole your fancy loose leaf stuff, none of my shitty Lipton.”

Clarke forces a smile. “Thanks.”

Raven’s mouth opens, closes, opens again. She shifts her weight, and her leg brace creaks. “Look. I’m not excusing everything Octavia just did. She was way out of line. And your feelings are always more important than some dude’s, even if that dude is Bellamy. But also…cut her a little slack. Aurora’s going in for another round of treatments tomorrow.”

Clarke nearly spills burning tea across her lap. “What? But I thought—”

“Yeah,” Raven says, “apparently not. And it’s expensive as hell, too, just to add more stress to everything.”

Clarke looks down at her mug and briefly imagines drowning herself in it.

 

#

 

A week passes where everything is terrible.

She misses Bellamy.

She wishes she didn’t.

Clarke doesn’t film any videos, or take any pictures, or so much as retweet a bad pun. Her notifications fill up with people asking her where she’s gone (and where Bellamy’s gone), but she ignores them. She watches a lot of Grey’s Anatomy and draws a lot of _terrible_ fruit bowls. Deeply, impressively terrible.

Her studio art professor pulls her aside after class. He doesn’t have to say a word. Clarke takes one look at his face and gets a gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Miss Griffin, I cannot help but notice you’ve been…well, in a bit of a funk, I’d say.”

“I’m okay,” Clarke says automatically.

He looks very sympathetic, which is disconcerting. Pity is the last thing Clarke wants from a professor. “If you say so. But I’m afraid to say your art is not.”

Clarke glances at the easel before her and has no defense. It really is a wretched fruit bowl.

“Miss Griffin, you have talent. And before this week, you were a pleasure to have in class. Diligent, focused, innovative. I would like that Clarke Griffin back.”

 _So would I,_ she thinks, but she stares at her apocalyptically bowl of mangos.

“Come to my Thursday life drawing class. Perhaps it’ll clear your head. Get a few good sketches in, and it could do you wonders.”

Clarke feels a flicker of alarm. “I couldn’t—”

“It was not a suggestion,” the professor says gently.

Clarke’s stomach sinks right through the floor.

She has never failed a class in her entire life.

“I’ll be there,” she says.

 

#

 

Clarke decides not to be a mess when Thursday rolls around, and she’s determined to get her art grade back up where it belongs.

She arrives at the studio five minutes before class begins, but the room is already full. The model stands on the platform in the middle of the room wearing nothing but a robe. His back is to her, and all she can see of him is curly dark hair.

Clarke drops her pastels.

They clatter with the force of a bomb on the tile floor, and the entire class swings around to stare at her.

Bellamy’s eyes pop wide.

It’s hard to tell which one of them is the most mortified. Clarke is pretty sure she’ll never move again, but Bellamy looks like he’s been struck by lightning. Her face is definitely some violent shade of magenta.

The barest scrap of sanity returns to her. She drops to the floor and scrambles to pick up her pastels before rushing to hide behind her easel.

_What what what what what._

_What is he doing here?_

How the hell is she going to get through this? There is no page in the Clarke Griffin Survival Handbook that explains how to make it through a life drawing class where _Bellamy Blake_ is the model.

Is there a way to draw the life model without ever _looking_ at the life model?

_Why is he here?_

The professor, blithely oblivious to the fact that Clarke is slowly and inexorably dying, calls the class to order. “Model, if you could disrobe and assume the first pose.”

Oh god. OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD.

She hears the _flomp_ of the robe hitting the floor. Someone in the room giggles. Clarke keeps her gaze _resolutely fastened_ on her own easel like it contains the secrets of the universe. She will not think about the fact that she’s in a room with a naked Bellamy. If she doesn’t look at him, he doesn’t exist. Simple logic. She has to keep breathing. She’s a Slytherin supervillain, for god’s sake. She can do this.

They start with a series of five-minute gesture drawings. Everyone else begins sketching in loose, large strokes, cataloguing the graceful slope of the model’s pose, but Clarke can barely hold her charcoal.

The professor circles the room. He frowns at her blank sheet of newsprint.

She swallows hard. She’s going to have to look at him.

She can do this. Gesture drawings are easy. You barely have to look up to make a gesture drawing. She just has to indicate a limb here, show where his weight rests, good to go.

For god’s sake, Clarke is premed with a fine arts minor. The human form is nothing—it should be nothing. What’s a body, really? Muscles and bone, skin and shadows. It’s a collection of lines. _Think of it not as a body but as a form_ , her professor always says. _Draw merely what you see before you, not what you assume is there._

Bracing herself, she looks up.

And. Yeah. _No._ That’s not line or form or any Spock-ian supervillain rationalization.

THAT IS A NAKED BELLAMY.

Abs. Biceps. Collarbone. Forearms. Tan. _Freckles_.

And.

His.

HIS. UM.

_Clarke cannot do this._

The egg timer goes off. It’s so shrill that Clarke jumps.

Bellamy changes his position. He was in profile before, but now he deliberately and carefully turns away from her. But that just means she can see his butt, Bellamy Blake’s _god damn actual ass_ , and of course it’s sheer perfection and what RIGHT DOES HE HAVE?

How is she supposed to live in a world where she has seen Bellamy Blake’s naked butt? How does one go forward from that?

“Miss Griffin?” The professor pauses behind her easel, looking very concerned. “An entire sketch period has gone by and you didn’t draw anything.”

 _Fuck_. A blush blazes Clarke’s cheeks. What can she say? _Sorry, professor, I was too busy trying not to think of all the torrid fanfition I’ve read about me having sex with the life model? Who, by the way, confessed his love for me last week and then kissed me so thoroughly that I can still feel his hands in my hair and against my back and pressed into my thighs?_

Yeah, _no_.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I—I spaced out. I’m undercaffeinated today.”

“Hmm.” The professor frowns. “Well, see what you can do with this new pose.”

Under his eye, Clarke is forced to weakly imply the line of Bellamy’s form. But she just can’t bring herself to add any details of his naked hotness. Not with a _witness_. It feels _illegal._

“Ah.” The professor nods sagely. “I see. you are affected by the model.”

Clarke wants to die immediately. An actual squeak escapes her. “No! I’m fine! It’s fine. Everything is _fine_.”

The girl at the easel next to her snorts, and Clarke throws her a savage look.

When the egg timer rings again, it’s time for Bellamy’s first break. Clarke hunches behind her easel and hopes Bellamy has somehow forgotten she exists.

 _Argh._ When did Clarke Griffin become a scared, hiding sort of girl? She hates this. She _hates_ what he does to her. She hates this person. She’s stronger than this.

_Get. A. Grip._

She _will_ get a grip. She can do this.

She is Clarke fucking Griffin.

They’re onto twenty-minute sketches now. This time, when the professor cranks the egg timer and Bellamy takes his first seated pose, she detaches her brain. She becomes Rational Clarke. She is just a pair of eyes and a hand.

_I can do this._

_That is not Bellamy’s penis. I can think the work penis. That is just a cylinder, with a shadow, and a form, and a line._

_That is just a collection of shapes._

_That figure is nothing but a 3D image I need to distill into lines_.

She knows how to do that.

She sticks to the body. That could be anyone’s body. She leaves his face blank, only lightly implying his hair and entirely skipping his features.

When the professor circles around to her side again, his lips press together. Clarke knows she can’t get away with headless nudes. And not just because they look rather creepy. She’s gone right past supervillain to serial killer.

The egg timer rings.

“All right, another brief recess for Mr. Blake, and then we’ll move onto our full color portrait.” The professor sounds far too cheerful for Clarke’s liking. “This session will be an hour and a half long, so you’d better choose a pose you can hold, my boy.”

Bellamy pulls on the robe and steps down from the platform to grab a glass of water. He passes terribly close by. Clarke makes a meal of setting out her pastels, brushing off the multicolored powder, organizing them in a rainbow. She never looks up.

She just has to survive the next hour and a half.

But she can’t get away with only drawing his extremities. Not for this portrait.

This time she watches Bellamy as he gets into position. Watches as he disrobes. He’s self-conscious about it, she realizes with a start, noting how quickly he does it, and something about that softens her. Makes her remember that he may be this intimidating Greek God of a human, with all his egregious muscles and Golden Ratio features, but he’s still her Bellamy.

There’s a fainting couch on the platform, and Bellamy slings himself on it not unlike one of those French girls. Her brain whites out for a second.

The professor is watching Clarke sternly, his gaze full of disappointment.

She takes a breath. _Oh god. Okay, Clarke. Get in the zone._

_Accept who and what you are drawing and just do it._

So she does.

This time, she does not detach her brain. She does not lock up her heart.

She lets her eyes paint him first. She absorbs him. She lets her brain fully grasp the way he looks, the planes of him, the way the light bathes him. She’s jealous of how intimately it gilds every plane of his chest and picks out the edge of his jaw. She’s always liked his jaw. She notes the slight strain in the way he holds himself, tense in the shoulders, all the tendons of him.

This time, she lets herself look at his face.

His eyes flicker over to meet hers. Her breath catches, her toes curl, but she doesn’t look away. She makes herself hold steady.

Somewhere, in a distant corner of her thoughts, she realizes that finally getting to draw him is a treat.

This is her selfish gift to herself.

So Clarke draws him decadently. She lets her eyes drink him, lets her pastels caress his edges. She strokes her gaze along his muscles. She swooshes and flicks the lines of his curls and wishes she’d touched his hair when they’d kissed. What a wasted opportunity. It’s a van Gogh masterpiece all on its own, full of Starry Night whorls and hidden galaxies. She drags the edge of her pastel across the bow of his lips and remembers their taste. She wraps her gaze around the swell of his thighs and can practically feel them leaning against her.

The whole time, he watches her.

The air in the room feels thick.

He’s looking at her like _she’s_ naked. Or at least, that’s how it feels. Those nerve endings he woke up so dramatically with his kiss are now crackling, and heat is building inside her to the point where she honestly fears she might catch on fire.

She wonders if he can feel her eyes stroking him from head to toe. She wonders if he’s drawing the lines of her face the way she is his. The bend of his nose, the dark of his irises, the shadow of his brow, the folds of his mouth, the dimple of his chin, the precise cut of his cheekbones. His lips, his lips, his lips.

His gaze is dark. She feels it like a caress.

When the egg timer rings, he jumps, and she knocks several pastels off the edge of her easel.

Reality rushes back. All the other artists, all the noise, the chatter, people flipping closed sketchbooks and snapping shut pencil cases. It’s like for the last half hour she and Bellamy had been slowly asphyxiating, but  a window’s been busted open and suddenly the room is full of oxygen and her brain is working properly again.

They gape at each other.

Clarke bites her lip. _God_. He’s still naked. Her mouth is dry.

She hears him mutter “ _Shit_ ”, and he swings off the fainting couch, yanking the robe back on.

Clarke shakily gets to a stand. Her knees are watery, and her heart is racing, but she makes the choice to step toward him. _You can do it, Clarke. Just talk to him_.

But this time, it’s Bellamy who runs away. And Clarke who stands there stunned, feeling like she just got dropped from space.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was the scene that inspired this whole AU idea. Hope you enjoyed! I've taken several life drawing classes before, but I never had the pleasure of drawing Bellamy Blake, ALAS.


	9. Project BC

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke watches some very important videos and comes to some very obvious conclusions.

Clarke heads back to her dorm in a daze.

Raven’s gone again, thank god. No way could she explain how completely unable to human she is right now. She’s on autopilot as she removes her coat, kicks off her boots, and sets down her book bag.

She can’t process. It’s just white noise in her head.

Without quite knowing what she’s doing, she opens up her laptop and plugs Project BC into YouTube.

It’s a channel, one with about forty thousand subscribers, which is an insane number considering there are only ten videos uploaded.

But it only takes her a second to understand.

It’s them. Monty, Jasper, Raven, Octavia, Harper, Miller, Murphy—it’s them.

No wonder they’ve been so _weird._

She watches the videos that feature her friends in the thumbnails first. All of the culprits are jammed together on the couch in Bellamy’s suite (without Bellamy, of course.) Jasper explains to the camera what this downright Shakespearean shipping plot will entail. He looks like a mad scientist concocting a scheme to take over the world.

“We know all you lovely viewers have lost patience,” he says, “and so have we.”

“I never had any,” Raven says.

Octavia rolls her eyes. “Just lock them up in a closet and be done with it.”

Monty and Jasper exchange self-high fives.

Clarke plays the next one.

Cut to Harper giggling as she locks her dorm room door behind her, hastily explaining the “genius plan” to the camera.

“Alone in a dorm room the size of a broom cupboard,” she crows. “What could go wrong?”

She meets Monty and Raven by the elevator, and they all pound fists.

So many plots. So many people Clarke loves conspiring to make sure she’s happy.

The other thumbnails are of her and Bellamy. She has a terrible, twisting feeling in her chest, so sharp it’s almost like fear. But not quite. She holds her breath and forces herself to hit play.

_It’s them._

She’s not even aware of the tears gathering in her eyes.

Clarke recognizes her own dorm. The camera films covertly from Raven’s side of the room as Clarke and Bellamy share a bag of chips, their hands dipping in and out in perfect harmony, first hers, then his, without them even realizing.

Then they’re in the common room of Bellamy’s suite. She and Bellamy are studying together at the coffee table. She remembers that night, Jasper bouncing around with a camera, Monty stifling his laughter, and Bellamy shooting Jasper an irritated scowl as he brought Clarke a cup of coffee.

On camera, Bellamy blows on it before handing it to her. She looks up at him with a smile, and Clarke’s breath catches, seeing herself smile like that. Like Bellamy’s handed her an actual star from the sky, or his own heart, instead of just an ordinary mug.

“Why didn’t you bring _me_ coffee?” Video Jasper asks.

“Shut up, Jasper,” says Bellamy.

Jasper flips the camera around and waggles his eyebrows suggestively.

There are stalkery, long distance shots of her and Bellamy walking together. Clarke brushing snowflakes off his shoulders. Her scarf falls from her bag, and Bellamy picks it up and loops it around her neck. It’s all the small moments Clarke hasn’t noticed. The things she cuts from her videos. The actions she performs so naturally she isn’t even aware of them.

She doesn’t remember brushing snowflakes off Bellamy. How many times has she done it without thinking?

There’s a clip of them asleep on the suite couch. It must have been a gang movie night, but which one, she has no clue. Her head has drooped onto his shoulder, and his head rests on top of hers. Their curls mingle.

“Precious idiots,” says Raven’s voice off camera.

There are clips from Grounders where they’re all crammed into a big booth, laughing and talking, and Bellamy is watching Clarke.

Bellamy watching Clarke as they’re in the car, driving to the movies, and even though he’s the dumbass driving, his gaze is sideways.

Bellamy watching Clarke brew a perfectly ordinary cup of tea. Watching her frown as she reads her bio textbook. Bellamy watching Clarke sketch so intently it’s like he’s the one sketching her in his mind.

Then there’s Clarke watching Bellamy watch Octavia. Clarke watching Bellamy read, his fingers drumming on the table. Clarke watching Bellamy doing absolutely nothing at all.

She realizes she’s crying when she reaches the very last clip. Clarke remembers when this one happened. She’d forgotten her gloves, and her hands were half frozen. She watches as, on-camera, Bellamy takes hold of her small hands in his large, square ones and chafes them between his. And then he blows a warm breath across her knuckles.

And the way on-camera Clarke smiles softly up at him makes a sob break in Clarke’s chest.

Bellamy’s seen this. After he kissed her, he said he’d watched the Project BC videos. He said he’d read the comments.

Oh, God.

_The comments_.

 

**Lady Nymeria**

I. Am. The deadest. Of deads.

**Queen Susan**

HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT????

**Sarah Elizabeth**

THEY’RE IN LOVE

**CupcakeQueen**

*sobs in Bellarke*

**Cady Heron**

have they seriously not admitted it yet???

**OctavianBlakee**

YOU GUYS ARE NATIONAL HEROES FOR THIS

**Ever G**

I can’t take it I have never seen anything more pure hE blEw oN HeR CoFfEeeEEeE

**DelenaxTrashx**

no but honestly, this is one of the most beautiful love stories I’ve ever seen. Like, you guys don’t know. It’s seriously built on so much trust and genuine care. Have you ever seen anything more tender? I’m on the floor. Please tell me they’ve realized how much they love each other. PLEASE.

**Auntie Bellum**

If I ever see a bellarke kiss in my lifetime I think I will ACTUALLY cease living but then of course I’ll come back from the dead so I can see another one

**Loony Lovegood**

I CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO SEE A BELLARKE KISS, CAN THE WORLD HANDLE THAT MUCH BEAUTY LIKE THE CAMERA WILL BREAK YOU CAN’T LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN

 

Clarke buries her face in her hands. Is she laughing or sobbing? Emotion so strong she can’t identify it is strangling her heart. Her pulse is roaring.

She also wants to know what it would be like to see a Bellarke kiss.

Clarke scrambles for her camera, which she hasn’t touched in a week. She hasn’t deleted the footage from that disastrous, aborted q and a, so it’s right there where she left it. She sucks in a deep breath, bracing herself.

She skips to the moment where On-Camera Clarke hears Bellamy’s knock and sees her own expression go carefully blank. Raven smiles like an evil genius and leaps toward the door.

On-Camera Clarke is still facing away from the door, sitting utterly still, but now Clarke can catch a glimpse of Bellamy stepping into frame. She notes his slightly frantic, entirely confused, utterly adorable face, and the way his eyes go at once to Clarke. His confusion deepens.

_He’s seen the videos_ , Clarke remembers. _He came here knowing how he felt. How I felt_.

She presses her cold hands to her hot cheeks.

Raven abandons them, just as planned. And now Bellamy’s sitting beside her on the bed, _this_ bed, and Clarke is painfully away of the sliver of space between them on camera. Bellamy watches Clarke so intently that Clarke wants to yell at her on-camera self to _look up. Just look up, you absolute fool_. But on-Camera Clarke moves like a robot and keeps her gaze fastened on nothing.

And then they’re talking. Talking earnestly, like the rest of the world doesn’t even exist, and on-camera Clarke finally looks up. Clarke stops breathing at the look that slides between them and holds. _Holds_.

Do they really _look_ like that when they’re looking at each other? How can anyone stand this? It’s so desperately intense that it reminds her of some kind of classical painting, some scene out of mythology with doomed lovers and sea monsters and avenging gods. And all they’re doing is sitting next to each other on a bed. Looking at each other.

But Bellamy has his whole heart in his eyes, and oh, what a heart.

_“I should have told you those packages meant everything,”_ on-camera Bellamy says, _“But it’s hard to admit how much things matter to you. Especially when they’re so fucking important it scares you the shit out of you.”_

She sees her on-camera-self panic just as the resolve forms in Bellamy’s eyes. His entire body is turned toward her. The telltale muscle in his jaw flexes.

_“Bellamy…”_ Clarke’s voice breaks. She’s shaking “ _I—The camera. We should—”_

_“Fuck the camera.”_

His deep voice startles her.

Clarke holds her breath, her knuckles pressed to her lips, as it finally happens. She nearly looks away at the last second, but she forces herself to watch. Forces herself to _see_ what she’s refused to see for so long.

It’s like looking at naked Bellamy again. It’s just so much. There are no walls, no barriers, no nothing. He just—kisses her. His hand runs through her hair. He tilts her chin up gently, easily. His eyes squeeze shut. And Clarke sees her on-camera self actually relax for the briefest of moments.

They look…good.

They look natural.

Clarke can feel the ghost of him against her lips.

And then on-camera Clarke ruins everything. She yanks herself away, staggering to a stand, and Clarke sees Bellamy’s expression fall as Clarke races out like she’s fleeing the scene of a crime.

Bellamy sits there, alone in Clarke’s dorm, for several moments. He looks stunned. He’s breathing heavily. Then he wipes a hand across his mouth, glances at the camera, and turns it off.

Clarke also shuts off the camera.

She is such an idiot.

Such, such, _such_ an idiot.

And then her own resolve kicks in. She has an idea for a Project BC of her very own. After all, Slytherin supervillains go after the things they want, don’t they?

She jams the camera onto the tripod, sets it to record, and stares into the red light.

“Bellamy?” Her voice is thick. She hides her shaking hands under her thighs. “I don’t know if you’ll watch this…but please watch this.”

Hopefully it’s enough.


	10. Refuge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke sent a video. Bellamy has watched that video.

An hour later, the video’s edited and ready for upload. Clarke sets it to private, clicks the button, and waits. And paces. And waits some more. And then it’s up.

It takes every ounce of courage she has to send the link Bellamy, but she does.

And then she waits some more.

“I’m losing my mind,” Clarke says, out loud. She’s so nervous she feels like she’s going to throw up.

Okay, no. She can’t just sit here. She needs to get out of here, go somewhere, anywhere, where she won’t think about how she sent Bellamy a clip of them kissing. _Kissing._ Bellamy could be watching them kiss right now, which is so embarrassing she doesn’t know what to do with herself. What if this was all a big mistake? What was she thinking?

She knows what she was thinking. And it’s already done. She can’t take it back.

She doesn’t want to.

Which is why she has to get out of here.

She bundles into her coat and leaves so quickly she’s nearly jogging. Her nervous energy carries her down the campus walkway, past Grounders. She considers going in for coffee, but can’t bear the thought of sitting still. She considers heading to the dining hall for dinner, but she’s not remotely hungry. Her stomach is full of leaping nerves.

She wanders in a nonsense circle and ends up back at her dorm building.

 _Pull yourself together_ , she tells herself sternly. _You. Are. A grown up._

She takes the stairs two at a time, and when she turns onto her hall, she sees him.

He’s sitting outside her door. Their eyes catch, and he scrambles to a stand at once, so quickly it’s like he’s been cattle-prodded. He looks frantic.

“I saw it.” He’s breathless. “I saw your video.”

They stare at each other. Clarke’s heart is staggering like it’s drunk, lurching and stumbling every which way.

She opens her mouth to speak and catches the sound of Raven’s overloud music blasting through the door. Shit.

“Your suite?” Clarke says.

Bellamy shakes his head. “They’re all there.”

Clarke bites her lip, her brow furrowing. And then she smiles. “Not for long.”

Bellamy is staring at her like he’s never quite seen her before.

Clarke shoots Octavia a very long text, waits for a reply, sighs in relief, and then texts Monty. _Party in octavia’s room right now. Watching TLJ. snacks and booze_.

 _YES_ , Monty responds immediately. _All in_.

She pockets her phone. “That will lure them out.”

Bellamy grins, and her breath catches. She could live in that grin. Whole planets and ecosystems and atmospheres could be powered by it.

She’s been so stupid.

 

#

 

The walk to Bellamy’s building is both wonderful and torturous. Neither of them speaks, but Clarke is intensely aware of him beside her. She catalogues the precise swing of his arms, the angle of his head, the rhythm of his footsteps. Her heart is buzzing.

His dorm is indeed empty. Clarke’s breath rushes out in relief, but the nerves also kick in double-time. There’s no last second reprieve, and no audience to interfere. She’s really doing this.

Her phone beeps. It’s a text from Octavia, promising to keep the boys as long as possible.

 

 **O:** Overnight if you need ;)

 **Clarke:** !!! That’s not what this is. We need to talk.

 **O:** Suuuuuuuuuuuure

 **O:** Now let’s never talk about this because it’s gross

 **O:** don’t hurt him again

 

Clarke’s heart turns over in her chest, guilt and nerves and the tiniest sparkling thread of excitement. She puts her phone away, takes a breath, and looks up at him.

He’s watching her in that steady, Bellamy way of his. She’s reminded again of quiet woods and a still lake beneath a starlit sky. It’s a powerful kind of silence. She knows that most people feel the exact opposite, but to her, Bellamy has always felt restful. Her refuge in human form. His gaze gives her room to think.

But right now she _can’t_ think. She’s so overwhelmed by _him._ All his angles, all his _there-_ ness.

_A Study in Blake._

They’re standing just inside the closed front door, like they don’t dare walk too far inside lest it freak the other out. This time, they’re both wary gazelles eyeing the other. Both easily spooked and very suspicious.

She can’t really believe they’re standing on the edge of this.

“So,” she says, very intelligently. “You watched my video.”

“I did.”

“I…I watched all the other ones. Project BC.”

“Did you.”

She half-laughs. “We really need to vary it up. Surely we know at least a few other words.”

He smiles and shakes his head.

She watches his curls sway almost dreamily. He really is distractingly beautiful. Clarke has never been a girl who allows distractions, but perhaps distractions are good when they’re the right ones.

“Okay,” he says. “If you want to talk, then tell me honestly. Why’d you start acting so weird? Before I kissed you, I mean.”

“Oh, _God_.” The words escape before she can stop them. She drops her face in her hands. “Okay. You’re going to think I’m insane.”

“I promise I won’t.”

“No, you will. Because I went into my own fandom. Our fandom.”

“Our _what_?”

“I went on Tumblr. I read the comments. I fell down the rabbit hole of the tag. There are gifs of us, Bellamy. Hundreds of them. There’s fan fiction, and I _read_ it, and some of it is deeply terrible, but some of it—” She breaks off, flushing. “Well, some of it is completely inappropriate, and I read that too, but—”

“Whoa.” Bellamy lifts a hand. “Hold on. You read smutty fan fic about us?”

“…Define smutty.”

“I could. Or I could just show you.”

Clarke is hit with a bolt of lust so strong she actually wobbles. Her breath tangles up in her throat, and it’s several seconds before her heart restarts. His gaze is dark and intent, just like when she was drawing him.

“Fine,” Clarke says. “I read smutty fanfic about us. A lot of it. So when you kissed me in real life…I freaked.”

“I don’t understand.” He moves closer. Her eye line is level with his throat. She remembers tracing her pastels along the strong, curving line of it, down into that beautiful notch at the base, letting her highlights kiss his Adam’s apple.

She swallows. “You see, even with all that fictional evidence, it took me about a hundred years to even _acknowledge_ there was something between us. Let alone accept it.”

“Something.” Bellamy’s hand plays with the flap of her coat.

“Something…not as safe as my other friendships.” She’s having difficulty pulling out the right words and slotting them into order. Her head feels very empty. “I was trying, but I wasn’t quite there yet. And whatever ground I’d made was very fragile. And then in one moment you blew apart that carefully constructed…I don’t know, _armor_ of mine, before I’d really adjusted, or prepared, and I…well…”

“You freaked.” He tugs at her coat, pulling her slowly closer to him.

She lets him.

“Everyone I care about,” Clarke says, her voice embarrassingly breathless, “has left me. Wells. My dad. My mom. And then after Finn—”

“It’s okay,” he says softly. “I get it.”

“You don’t. Because now I realize I was looking at it all wrong. You’re not a risk. You’re the safest thing I have.”

She can’t describe the look in his eyes.

This time, she’s the one who makes the first move. She hooks her hands around Bellamy’s neck, cupping the nape in both her hands. It’s his breath that catches, and his eyes that flare wide.

She smiles, and it’s amazing how all the tension in her body evaporates when his hands slowly, almost disbelievingly, come to rest on her hips.

Their foreheads meet.

“Hey, Clarke?” he says, his voice low and gravelly.

She shuts her eyes. “Yes?”

“I’m going to kiss you now.”

“Okay.”

“So don’t run off.”

“Okay.”

“Because last time you—”

“ _Okay_ ,” she says, breaking into laughter, but then his lips are on hers again and laughter is the last thing on her mind.

Her mouth remembers him. The sensation of coming home floods her body. The softness of his lips, the solidness of his chest, the curling whisper of his hair beneath her hands. It’s all so intimately familiar and thrillingly foreign, all at the same time.

Bellamy groans, pulling her even closer, his hands spanning her waist. She feels drunk on sunlight, the way you only get when you’ve been sitting by the pool for hours on end and the whole world stops moving. The edges of her melt right into him. She wants to fuse herself to Bellamy and never come apart, weaving himself in his hair, molding herself to his lips, smoothing her fingers along the soft, secret skin at the nape of his neck.

“Is this really happening?” he whispers into the hollow beneath her jaw.

She shivers. “I hope so.”

He kisses down her throat while he slips the coat off her shoulders, and Clarke’s breaths stick in a pained sort of choke.

“So what happened next?” Bellamy murmurs. “In those stories you read?”

Heat shoots through her stomach, thudding hard between her legs. “Well…they usually went something like this.”

She slips his coat off too, letting it fall to the floor, and then pulls pointedly at his sweater. So fast it’s almost comical, Bellamy whips it off, leaving behind a t-shirt and an adorably rumpled head of curls. She smooths them, because she can, and then lets her hand trail down his jaw. She sets her thumb in his dimple. She traces his nose.

“What are you doing?” he says, in a rough, strangled voice.

“Painting you. Line by line.”

“God, Clarke—”

She presses her mouth back over his, harder this time, so hard she slams him against the wall. He gasps against her, tugging her close so their hips bang together. She can’t remember anything but Bellamy, like he found a way into every one of her memories. She’d forget her name if he wasn’t whispering it into her collarbone, kissing it into her jaw.

“You—” He tries to breathe, and she laughs because the word is so uneven it’s hardly a word at all. He laughs too. “You—are going to be the death of me—”

“I’m going to be the _life_ of you.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says, like a general conceding defeat, and scoops her off the ground.

Her legs wrap around him. He spins so her back presses against the door, and the full weight of him, the pressure of his body between her legs, is so much that Clarke is actually afraid she is going to faint.

“That was _definitely_ in a fic I read,” she gasps.

Bellamy kisses her, slowly and thoroughly, until her bones turn to rubber and she’s forgotten they’re even on planet earth. The only gravity in the world is Bellamy, holding her firmly, the only thing keeping her from shooting into space. When he finally pulls away, she’s trembling.

“ _Why_ ,” she whispers, “are you so good at that? Who gave you the right?”

He laughs and drops a kiss on the tip of her nose.

It hits her how strange this is. How magically, miraculously wonderful. Clarke is _touching_ Bellamy, like this, in ways and places she’s never touched him before. It stills feel forbidden, somehow, which makes it all the more satisfying.

She’s never done anything like this. God knows Bellamy is probably sick to death of hearing about Clarke’s walls, but for the first time, she’s pulled another person completely inside of them. And the only wall that exists is the one at her back, keeping the rest of the world away from them.

From Bellarke.

It’s the greatest treat in the world to be allowed to bury her fingers in the hair at the back of his head, to trace the sharp line of his jaw, to slide her hands around his hips and steal a patch of skin at his back. He gasps as her fingers find his bare spine.

Clarke grabs hold of his shirt until her fists are full. There isn’t enough time in the world.  She wants more. Clarke lifts the hem of his shirt to explore more skin, more muscles, more Bellamy. He lets out a ragged sound, and she captures it in her mouth. In a moment the t-shirt is gone, and he’s standing before her half bare.

The whole world holds its breath. Clarke slides to the ground, stunned still.

“Nothing you haven’t seen before,” Bellamy jokes, because it is well established that Bellamy is _terrible_ at jokes.

Of course she’s seen his chest before. She’s drawn every inch of it, has studied it with more focus than is remotely sane. But there’s something about it now, _here_ , when it’s just for her, in the mundane light of his dorm suite as it holds a heart that wants hers. Bellamy’s chest, rising and falling with breaths that she’s turned ragged, is the most beautiful thing in the world.

 She presses her hand flat against his heart. He shudders.

“Your turn,” she whispers.

He understands, because he’s Bellamy. They’ve always understood one another implicitly. They have always been balanced.

So when his shirt comes off, so does hers.

He lifts it slowly, watching as every pale inch of her is uncovered. He swallows. Hard. She’s wearing her plainest beige bra, but Bellamy still looks like he’s been punched in the solar plexus.

His thumb skims the curve of her waist, and goosebumps prickle along her skin. A muscle jumps in the base of her belly, and her hands tighten on his hips reflexively.

“Shit,” she breathes.

They stand there for several moments, each trying to catch their breath. She’s painfully aware of Bellamy looming above her. He braces himself against the wall, caging her in. She hooks a finger in the belt loop of his jeans and tugs.

“ _Shit_ ,” he breathes.

“These next.”

Slowly, gently, he reaches a hand up and clears her hair from her eyes. His fingertips burn a soft trail across her skin, skimming her cheeks and the curve of her jaw.

But when he speaks, his voice is rough. “Dear god, _please_.”

Clarke laughs.

Bellamy’s arms hook around her thighs, and he lifts her again, her legs circling his waist automatically. He carries her across the common room and into his own bedroom, then kicks the door shut.

“Lock it,” Clarke says.

“I don’t take orders from you,” he says, but of course he does it.

There is no one watching. There are no commenters, no conspirators, no cameras.

It’s just them.

Together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finally got to use the title in text! Yayyyyy


	11. Better Than (Fan)Fiction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gratuitous fluffsmut, the best kind.

The mattress creaks beneath her back as he lowers her, the line of his body rising above hers. He brushes his nose down her jaw.

“Holy shit,” he says. “You’re in my bed.”

“You’ve been in mine a hundred times.”

“I’ve been _on_ your bed. This is different. You’ve been reading fan fiction about us, but I’ve been writing it in my own damn head for—Jesus. At least a year.” He grins in that self-deprecating Bellamy way and pulls back to look at her, his eyes lingering on her breasts like they just can’t help themselves. “Are you sure this is real? I haven’t eaten Jasper’s brownies or something?”

“Like I’d let you do that again. You and I did _not_ enjoy ourselves.”

He weaves his fingers through hers and presses their linked hands into the comforter. “You know, I think that was the first day I realized.”

“Realized what?”

“That you mattered to me. That what you had to say could change my life if I let it.”

“And did you?”

He grins. “What the hell do you think?”

Bellamy kisses her, imprinting the curve of his smile on her lips. She slips her hands down his strong, bare back. His palms follow the curve of her waist, curving against the hollow of her lower back, and her skin ignites.

“You know what I hate?” whispers Bellamy. “This bra.” He nudges the strap aside with his nose and kisses her bare shoulder. “It’s the worst thing in the world.”

Her eyes flutter shut. “Get rid of it, then.”

He unhooks the clasp, and the bra is cast aside. Cold air kisses her hot skin, making her shiver.

Bellamy lifts away from her. He looks, for a moment, like he’s scared he’s losing his mind. Like he’s hallucinating her lying there beneath him, and there is no way she could be real, but he doesn’t particularly care. He’ll die in this hallucination if he has to.

“Bellamy?” she whispers.

He kisses her soundly. Roughly. One thumb flicks across her nipple, and her back arches into him. Her fingers dig into his back.

_Holy fuck._

His lips sweep across her breast, soft kisses on soft skin, and she thinks she just might die if he doesn’t press that mouth where she wants it. And then he does, and she realizes she’s going to die anyway. Because they’ve barely started, and already she’s unraveling. She seizes the sheets in a tight, trembling fist. Her toes curl. He closes his lips and sucks, his tongue flicking across her nipple, and she feels it hard between her legs. She can’t breathe.

“Your pants,” she gasps.

Bellamy laughs against her skin. There’s something smug about it, like he knows he’s winning. “Is that a pick up line?”

“I hate them.” She slips her hand beneath the waistband. “Hate them a _lot._ ”

He lifts his head. “Get rid of them, then.”

She unbuttons the flap, so aware of what lies below that her movement are clumsy. She can see the strain in his jeans, and she is so breathlessly warm as she slides the zipper down that her ears are actually ringing. She feels like some other Clarke. Someone brave.

But there is no other Clarke. There’s just her. She’s doing this. She wants him.

Clarke takes her sweet time removing his jeans, her face level with his very full boxers, and Bellamy looks in active pain. “Just get them _off_.”

“Shh.” Clarke is the smug one now.

The jeans join her bra on the floor. She yanks Bellamy back on top of her, his bare chest pressing against hers. Their lips meet again and she dissolves completely. Nuclear bombs could fall from the sky and decimate everything around her, and she wouldn’t notice. Not when Bellamy’s hand is sliding up her thigh. Down her hip.

“I hate these jeans.”

She kisses his throat. “Get rid of them.”

Bellamy’s hand shakes as he unbuttons and unzips. She finds it adorable that those normally steady hands could fumble now, could tremble as he brushes against the bones in her hips, the skin of her thighs. Her bare skin prickles. She knows she should be self-conscious, but she’s not. Not with him. Not when he looks like he’s been clubbed in the head at the mere sight of her.

He traces a light finger along her stomach and over the lace edge of her underwear.

She arches, gasping.

“And these,” he whispers, stroking a finger along the center of her. “These I hate more than any other article of clothing on the fucking face of—”

“ _Get rid of them._ ”

He pulls them off with his teeth.

She’s so breathless she loses tracks of his movements. She forgets to play the game. Her breasts feel tight and her whole body is heavy. She’s not sure who tugs Bellamy’s boxers off, but her fingers are digging into his muscles, and they’re both bare now. His legs tangle with hers, and she can feel him. The full length of him. Their foreheads press together, and his eyes are dark and glistening and a little bit wild. Clarke slides her hands around to his backside and pulls him down. Pulls him against her.

She opens her mouth to say _Yes, do it, do it_ , but all that comes out is a breathy, jagged mess.

Bellamy laughs shakily. “Hold that thought, princess.”

“Don’t call me that,” she says, kissing the top of his shoulder. “That’s so freshman year.”

“I liked you in freshman year.”

“ _What?_ But you hated me!”

“No. I hated myself.” He strokes her hair. “You were just collateral damage.”

“Bellamy,” she says softly, and he places a finger against her lips.

“Right now is definitely not the time to feel sorry for me.” Bellamy laughs. It’s a sound she’ll never get tired of. She wishes he deployed it more often, because she’s pretty sure it could solve most international crises. “I’ve never felt less sorry for myself.”

Clarke kisses the tip of his finger. “I love you.”

She almost has to look away from him, like she’ll go blind from the force of the feeling that blazes in his eyes.

“ _Definitely_ hold that thought,” he says, and rolls off her.

She’s about to protest, and even lifts onto her elbows to glare at him, but he plants a kiss just below her belly button. And instead Clarke sighs, her head tipping back.

“ _Oh_ ,” she says.

He laughs before kissing lower. And lower.

Clarke’s brain shuts off. It disconnects and floats away from her, the way it did when Bellamy kissed her so hard in the snow that he knocked the sense right out of her. Because Clarke is always thinking, every second of every day, but now she doesn’t even know what thinking is. She is a bundle of nerves, a miracle of reflexes, a symphony of synapses firing as Bellamy slowly and thoroughly pulls her apart with his tongue.

And his fingers.

And that’s when she’s pretty sure she won’t survive whatever is next.

“ _Bellamy_.” She grips his hair. Magic, swoopy, Starry Night hair. She feels drunk. “More. You. Now.”

She expects him to make fun of her, but his gaze is as sun-drunk as hers, and when he fumbles for the box on his nightstand, he does it without words. She wonders if maybe he can’t speak anymore. The idea of it makes her pulse throb.

There’s the rip of foil, but Clarke stops him. She steals the condom from his grasp and slides it down him herself, watching with near scientific interest as he shudders and gasps at her touch.

“ _God,_ ” he says succinctly.

“Mm.”

He gently pushes her down into the mess of pillows, braces himself above her, and lowers his hips.

“Wait.” Clarke presses a hand to his stomach. She feels his muscles tremble beneath her fingers.

“Do you…do you not want—?”

“I do,” she says, and it’s the truth. She wants it so much that her hands are twitching with the instinct to grab hold of him, any part of him, she’s not picky. “I just…want to be able to see it.”

Bellamy sighs in full-bodied relief and drops a slow, melting kiss to her lips. She cups hold of his jaw.

He scoops his arms behind her lower back and props her up so her legs fall on either side of him. At this angle, she can see everything. She waits, her teeth digging into her lip, for the moment he slides into her. The moment they join. Then he does it, and her whole body unwinds, her muscles unclenching, her eyes fluttering shut.

And then he moves.

“ _God_ ,” she says, pretty sure she might be dying.

Bellamy tries to answer, but something that’s definitely not English comes out instead.

They’re a disaster. They’re wonderful. She never wants to stop.

Bellamy moves again, and Clarke’s hips lift and her head rolls back. She’s burning so hot she’s shivering. He thrusts, in and out, and Clarke can’t move or breathe or do anything, really.

She needs to be closer to him.

She sits up, careful not to disconnect from him, and loops her arms around his neck. The angle shifts, and he widens his thighs to accept her. They’re tangled together, nose to nose, their hips flush. She’s in his lap, gripping his waist with her legs. Now they have equal leverage.

This time Clarke is the one who rolls her hips, pulling him deeper inside of her, and Bellamy gasps against her neck. Again, and again, and maybe he’s thrusting, or maybe it’s her, but something is building between them that Clarke knows she can’t contain. Her body grows heavy and tight and then it’s not her body anymore. Something like a sob catches in her throat.

He breaks first. A shudder bends his spine, and his fingers dig into her back. And it’s the sight of Bellamy losing it, the way his eyes squeeze shut and his whole body tightens around her, that snaps the leash on her own climax. Her thighs clench, and she presses her lips hard to the curve of his shoulder as her hips buck, and break, and wring out every ounce of it until she’s shakingly empty. She sags against him, hiding her face in his throat. He holds her tight to his chest.

Clarke presses a kiss to his Adam’s apple. It’s as high as she can reach. “Nngh.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, low and scratchy and delirious. “Nngh.”

They flop back against the pillows. Clarke feels sleepy and stretched out. Bellamy’s chest is slightly damp against her cheek, and she closes her eyes and pretends she’s sinking right though it to rest against his heart. It’s such a frilly, romantic image that she giggles.

Clarke didn’t know she could giggle.

His fingers play with her hair, and time disintegrates for a bit. Maybe they fall asleep. Clarke’s not sure. She traces the muscles of his stomach and thinks how much better this is than life drawing. Next time she paints Bellamy, she wants him to be the canvas. She wants her fingers to be the brush.

“Not sure this is what the professor had in mind when he told me to get closer to my art,” she says, and Bellamy laughs into her hair.

Falling asleep with Bellamy in his bed is very different from doing it in hers. This time, she’s aware of the soft, slow slide into sleep, and wraps her arm around his torso, determined to bring him with her.


	12. Team Bellarke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Earned after-glow fluff. Stay in the happiness bubble, Clarke, come on now.

Clearly, Bellamy’s bed has been specifially engineered by teams of scientists to be the most comfortable place in the world. Clarke can’t remember the last time she felt this content, no tension in her shoulders, no leaky faucet of anxiety perpetually dripping in the back of her thoughts. She fits so neatly in the scoop of his arms that she can’t think of any good reason to ever leave it.

Clarke remembers thinking once that Bellamy was her negative space, like they were carved from the same knife stroke, and she smiles against his chest, which gently rises and falls as he breathes.

He’s utterly worn out. She’s got to admit, that’s pretty satisfying.

And it gives her time to inspect his room as thoroughly as she’s always wanted to. Her eyes rove around the small space with deep interest. Clarke has only been in here once or twice, and she was too careful—too afraid—to really give it the thorough investigation.

There are papers everywhere, stuffed under mountains of textbooks, stacked on his desk. It’s not really _messy_ , exactly but it’s definitely haphazard. His shelf is an endearing assortment of Norton Anthologies, science textbooks, mythology tomes bursting with sticky notes, and graphic novels. There are dumbbells in the corner (Clarke decides on the spot to use that as a nickname for him in the near future). Socks spill from a drawer.

Clarke grins at all these signs of Bellamy life.

Wow. She’s so far gone that she’s beaming at socks. Who is she?

Clarke wakes Bellamy with a soft, close-lipped kiss. “Question.”

His eyes blink open. This close up, she can see every emotion that sparks to life in his rich brown eyes: first confusion, then surprise, then delight. A satisfied smile spreads across his face as he fully takes her. “Anything.”

“If I’d asked you to dress up as a warrior princess for Halloween, would you have done it?”

“Yes.”

She laughs. “ _Really?_ ”

“I mean, maybe. I like doing stuff with you. Even stupid stuff.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Bellamy groans. “I’m so screwed, aren’t I?”

“The screwed-est.” She looks at him for several indulgent minutes, taking in the sleepy tousle of his curls, the miracle of his freckles this close up, and the way only one of his eyes has bothered to open.

She rolls off him with a groan, pulling free of the blankets and planting her bare feet on the floor. It’s astonishingly cold away from his body heat. He glows like a sun.

“What are you doing?” Bellamy grabs her waist at once. He sounds deeply offended.

“Getting dressed. If your motley crew of roommates comes back, I don’t want them discovering us in flagrante.”

“How are you always practical?”

“Trust me, there was nothing practical about what we just did.”

He doesn’t let go of her. She pulls his fingers off her waist one by one, and one by one he puts them back. She huffs in exasperation.

Bellamy smirks. It’s been a very long time since she’s seen him smirk like that, not since he was that cocky, freshman year ass in her poli sci class. She has to admit, it does something very dangerous to her pulse. Clarke is sure there’s something deeply wrong with her.

“Next year,” Bellamy says, “I’m renting my own apartment. I don’t care if I have to pose as a life model every day for a year to afford it, I’m doing it.”

“Or I could be your roommate,” Clarke says.

Every emotion ever invented seems to flicker across his face. He must be a special kind of overwhelmed because he settles for making a joke, and it has been well established that Bellamy Blake is as bad at making jokes as she is at drawing fruit bowls. “Damn, princess. Am I that good in bed?”

Clarke hits him with a pillow.

She escapes his grasp, and Bellamy sinks against the pillows in defeat. Clarke circles the room and collects her bra, jeans, and underwear. She kicks aside Bellamy’s pants and frowns, one hand on her hip.

“I hate to break it to you,” he says, watching her in amusement, “but your shirt is by the front door.”

“Damn it.”

“Guess you’ll have to stay here.”

“I’m not that easily foiled.” She yanks open his dresser, which is a predictable mess, and grabs the first t-shirt she sees. It’s army green and falls halfway down her thighs when she slips it on. She turns back to him in triumph, prepared for a smart remark, but he’s got that clubbed-on-the head look again.

Bellamy’s jaw hangs. His eyes scan her body, taking in her bare legs, her messy hair, and his t-shirt, and a fascinating sound escapes him.

Clarke grins. “Excellent. We’ve uncovered another Bellamy Blake weakness. I plan to exploit this.”

“Guh,” Bellamy says, and Clarke laughs and opens his bedroom door.

The suite common room is mercifully empty. Clarke glimpses her shirt lying by the front door next to both of their coats and Bellamy’s sweater. It’s spectacularly damning evidence. She can’t help but smile and shake her head. She should be embarrassed, but the sheer force of her happiness seems to have made that impossible.

But the gods are determined to test her, because the door opens.

And Jasper steps inside.

They both freeze. Dead still. Caught-in-a-laser-beam still. Struck-by-Medusa’s-gaze still.

They gape at each other for a full ten seconds.

A slow explosion of joy detonates across Jasper’s face, and she knows he’s approximately zero-point-three seconds away from shouting something completely heinous.

“ _Not. A. Sound_ ,” Clarke hisses, pointing straight at his face.

Jasper takes a breath.

“ _Shh!_ ” Clarke slashes a hand, and his mouth obediently snaps shut. “Good. Okay.” She glances at Bellamy’s closed bedroom door. “Are you alone?”

He nods like a bobblehead.

“Are the others spending the night at Octavia’s?” Another nod. “Good. Join them. And speak of this to no one.”

Jasper nods again, but then he just stares at her, his eyes exceptionally wide.

Clarke plants her hands on her hips. “ _What?_ ”

Jasper throws his arms around her so tightly that Clarke lets out a surprised _oof_.

“I’m really happy for you guys,” Jasper whispers, and he really does sound it. He’s practically giddy.

“Yeah, yeah,” Clarke says, fighting a smile. She shoves him away. “Not a word, Jasper.”

“No problem. Scout’s honor.” He gives her another delighted, goofy grin and practically skips out of there.

Clarke can’t help but laugh as she scoops the clothes off the floor and walks back to Bellamy’s bedroom.

“Well,” Clarke says calmly, sinking back onto the bed, “I hope you weren’t planning on keeping this a secret. Because I’m pretty sure everyone we know will know in about…oh, ten minutes, at the most.”

Bellamy mulls this over for a few seconds. Then he shrugs. “Them and the entire internet, I guess.”

“They’re making this a national holiday in Brazil,” Clarke says, slipping under his arm. “If they ever see that video I made you, the internet would break.”

“It was a pretty great video. You said some pretty excellent things.”

Worry tightens Clarke’s stomach. She did say a lot of things in that video—a lot of very private, very belated, very intimate things. But there were still things they hadn’t talked about.

She takes a breath and sits up. Bellamy’s brow furrows.

“I didn’t say enough, though.”  Clarke fingers a hole in the dark blue comforter. (A _hole._ Bellamy Blake, replace your bedding.) “What I did—what I said—you offered me so much with that kiss, and I was cruel. Even if I hadn’t felt the same way as you, you’re one of my best friends. Actually, you _are_ my best friend, though don’t tell Raven.”

His lips quirk. “Don’t tell Miller.”

Their pinkies link in an automatic pinky swear.

Clarke can’t help a faint smile. “I shouldn’t have been like that. Every time I replayed that conversation in my head for that awful week, I just started hating myself a little bit more each time—"

“Clarke, no. You don’t have to apologize. You weren’t trying to hurt me.”

“I think I was, a little.”

Bellamy doesn’t say anything. And she doesn’t know what he’s really feeling, because she can’t look at him.

“I might have been trying to hurt you too,” he says at last. “When I told you I wasn’t sure why I loved you.”

She sucks in a breath. Trust him to find her most vulnerable spot.

“I know exactly why I love you,” Bellamy says. “But you know us Blakes—if there’s anything around to hit, we’ll hit it, even if it breaks our fists. And since hurting you is basically the same as hurting me, and I really just wanted to _hurt_ in that moment—”

“How about this.” Clarke grabs his hand. “New pact. We stop hurting each other.”

“Simple enough.”

Clarke strokes a thumb across the knuckles she bandaged not so long ago. There’s a faint scar on one that’s fast fading. “I really thought you’d be okay without me.”

“Nobody’s ever okay.” He slips a knuckle beneath her chin and gently tips it up until she meets his gaze.  “But I’m so much damn closer when I’m with you.”

Clarke plants a small kiss on his lips. It’s supposed to be quick, nothing more than a _thank you_ and an _I’m sorry,_ but Bellamy hooks an arm around her shoulders, anchoring her to him. She sighs again and melts into him. He slowly rolls onto his back, and she follows him.

“Now for the ultimate question,” she murmurs, and he groans.

“More questions? I feel like I’m in one of your q-and-a videos.”

“Last one. I promise.” Clarke weaves her fingers through his and presses both his hands into the bed. “Bellamy Blake, do you ship us?”

“Clarke Griffin, I OTP the hell out of us.”

“Team Bellarke,” she says, and eases her lips over his.

Where they belong.


	13. Epilogue: 100 kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> <3

Clarke and Bellamy are squashed into the corner of the couch in Bellamy’s suite. Her friends take up the rest of the space and even spill onto the floor, laughing and passing bags of chips around.

Bellamy’s arm is around her shoulders. She reaches up and tangles their fingers together, and he shoots her a soft smile. It reminds her of Halloween a thousand years ago, when she nearly fainted because he touched her ankle and she could barely imagine what it would be like to draw his face. And now he’s touched a _lot_ more than her ankle, and she’s drawn a _lot_ more than his face. And both those things happened in the nude.

Murphy, sitting on the floor, rolls his eyes at the two of them. “ _Final-fucking-ly_. Honestly, if I had to hear another word about Jasper’s fucking ship plot—”

“ _Jasper’s?_ ” says Raven in outrage. “I think it’s well established that I’m the genius in this friend group?”

Octavia snorts. “Right. But I’m the one who finally made it happen, in the end.”

“By challenging Clarke to a duel like a Regency rake,” says Raven.

Bellamy straightens. “Wait, O challenged who to a what?”

Clarke gently pushes him back against the cushions. “Honestly, you don’t want to know. It’s not important.”

“But I—”

Clarke rests a finger against his lips. “Hush now.”

She hears a dreamy sigh and looks down to see Harper gazing back up at them.

“Why are you guys so perfect? Seriously, you’re perfect.”

“I always knew you would be,” Raven says.

“Please,” Clarke says, “we’re the farthest thing from perfect. We’re total messes. And you did _not_ always know.”

“Yes, I did! When are you all going to start believing that _Raven Reyes is always right?_ ”

“Since when?”

“Since the day you came back from freshman poli sci and couldn’t stop ranting about this asshole Bellamy Blake and his asshole opinions, and I asked you if he was hot, and you said very primly and very furiously “THAT’S NOT RELEVANT TO THIS CONVERSATION” and I knew. Right then. That he was hot.”

Clarke face lights on fire. Bellamy is looking distinctly pleased with himself, and she can’t let that stand.

She swings toward Jasper. “And you? When did you know that Bellamy liked me?”

“When he started writing Mr. Clarke Griffin on all his notebooks surrounded by little hearts.”

“I NEVER DID THAT,” says Bellamy

 _He so did_ , Jasper mouths at Clarke.

“No, I know when.” Monty grins. “It was after the pot brownie incident, and you guys had that intense talk, and then the next day in poli sci…you guys _worked_ together, somehow. Like, suddenly your fake government was successful and let me tell you, all of your cabinet members were _really_ grateful.”

Clarke and Bellamy smile at each other.

“I always knew my pot brownies would do great things,” says Jasper proudly.

Clarke doesn’t look away from Bellamy. It’s so nice to be allowed to look her fill of him.

Murphy groans. “You guys are unbearable to be around now, you know that?”

God, Clarke hopes so. She scooches along the couch so she can rest her head on Bellamy’s shoulder. She fits so well against him.

“I don’t think I really knew until that hug,” Octavia says.

“THE HUG HEARD ROUND THE WORLD,” Raven and Harper say in unison, and Harper laughs.

“Look,” Bellamy says. “I’m really grateful for Project BC. I don’t know how or when we would’ve gotten together without it. But if you guys ever pull something like that again…I will personally kick all of your asses.”

Murphy rolls his eyes. “Yeah, sure, until these idiots think it’s time for a proposal, in which case I’ll be roped into another stupid plot that probably involves hot air balloons and other ridiculous—"

“MURPHY,” Monty says.

Raven reaches across the coffee table to pinch Murphy’s arm. He yelps.

“ _Pro—_? Um. Guys. No.” Clarke is fantastically embarrassed. Bellamy is rigid beside her. “You know it’s been, like, a day? One day, right? Can we not put this under too close of a microscope?”

“ _Literally one day_ ,” Bellamy chokes out.

Raven looks at them with pity. “It’s so cute that you guys still consider yourselves private people.”

“Speaking of entirely not private things,” Octavia says, “when are you going to tell the masses?”

“Um. We haven’t discussed that.” Clarke glances at Bellamy, suddenly nervous. He’s always been camera-shy.

But he’s half smiling, one corner of his beautiful mouth lifting higher than the other. His shoulders rise and fall in a shrug, and her whole body relaxes. _Doesn’t matter to me_ , is what he’s saying. _I’ve got all I need already. Looking to you, princess_.

Clarke looks back at her wonderful, glorious, shiptastic, boundary-obliterating friends.

“I think I have an evil plot of my own," she says. "And I need your help.”

 

#

 

 

The evil plot lasts the rest of the semester. The snow melts and the trees sprout new green leaves. Clarke revels in the spring sunshine, with all its glorious promise, as she teases her viewers mercilessly.

She’s so careful about what she says. What she tweets. What she reveals. Her friends rise to the challenge with gusto, and she has to admit, it’s much more fun being _part_ of a plot instead of the _subject_ of one.

It’s Raven’s idea for her to tweet a picture of herself all dressed up. _Ready for a great night out for 2_. The responses are curious, imploring, almost panicked, but she ignores them and leaves it at that. The truth is, Bellamy is taking her out to dinner. It’s their one-month anniversary.

She brings Bellamy onto her videos just for a second or two, and always at the end. One time she leaves in nothing but his knock and allows herself a secret smile before the camera cuts. The comments are rabid.

“This is the most Slytherin thing you have ever done,” Bellamy tells her one afternoon, when they’re sitting together on her bed. Clarke’s laptop is open in front of them, streaming one of her videos, and Bellamy is taking care of the viscious knots in Clarke’s shoulders.

She closes her eyes as Bellamy’s hands solve all the problems in the world. “I know I can’t carry it out for much longer. But oh, it’s so fun to watch them lose their minds.”

Bellamy laughs and kisses the back of her head. “Pure evil.”

She films a video about everything she wants in a potential perfect partner. It describes Bellamy to a t, but she never says his name. There is pandemonium in the comment section like she has never seen before. No doubt there will be be a mob at the palace gates any day.

It’s time.

The video is called 100 Kisses.

“You sure about this?” Bellamy asks. It’s the week before exams, and the sunshine spilling through her dorm window is hard and golden. It gilds his cheekbones and practically makes love to his hair. Clarke loves Bellamy in the sunshine. They’ve been looking for apartments together for the last two weeks, and she’s determined to find one with a lot of light.

And soundproof walls.

“Couldn’t be surer.” She pats the space on the bed next to her, and Bellamy drops down. Their thighs press against each other.

She links their hands together, out of frame, and turns on the camera.

“Hello, Youtube!” She beams. “Exams are almost here. We’ve all been deep in the study cave, and, well, I’m tired of being a big ball of stress. We all deserve a break. So here to give it to us is the one and only Bellamy Blake!”

Bellamy waves at the camera. “Hey.”

Clarke bites her lip to keep her grin from sliding so wide that she gives the game away. But she can’t help it. She’s just so _happy_ sitting next to him. Sharing a secret. Sharing a plan. They make the best teammates.

“I thought we’d flip this q-and-a around,” she says. “So instead of me answering your questions, I’ll answer _Bellamy’s_. They’re sure to be terrible.”

“Undoubtedly,” says Bellamy, deadpan.

And they are. Bellamy reads them off his phone and proceeds to ask her the most banal questions imaginable: what brand of toothpaste she uses, the name of her first pet (she has never had a pet), whether she prefers whole, two percent, or skim milk (two percent).

But with every question, they slide a bit closer to one another. Clarke lets their gazes catch and hold. He smiles softly. Her eyes flicker toward his lips.

The room is feeling very hot and very close. She’s painfully aware that they’re sitting on a bed. Any second now the camera will burst into flames.

And then he gets to the last question.

“Clarke, do you kiss me on the regular?” Bellamy frowns at his phone. “Who talks like this?”

“Everyone. Now shh, you’re ruining the illusion that you wrote this. Ask the question properly.”

“Do we kiss on the regular?”

Clarke pretends to think very hard. “Define on the regular.”

Bellamy’s straight face holds admirably. “At least…two hundred times a day.”

“That’s extremely high. Of course not.”

“Okay, next question. Do you wish you kissed Bellamy two hundred times a day?”

Clarke shudders. “My lips would be _so_ chapped. Of course not.”

Bellamy lifts one eyebrow. “What about…a hundred and fifty.”

“Hmm.” She scrunches up her nose. “That still might give me pretty bad beard burn.”

“A hundred,” Bellamy says.

A slow smile stretches across her face. It feels like the sun is trying to rise inside her. “That just might be the perfect number.”

“A hundred it is.” Bellamy presses the softest, lightest kiss to her cheek. “Number ninety eight.”

He kisses her other cheek. Clarke’s eyes flutter shut.

“Number ninety-nine.”

She can’t bear a second longer. Clarke grabs his face and tugs him down to kiss her properly. He returns the kiss enthusiastically, one hand pulling her close by the back of the neck, the other cupping her face.

The world disappears as Clarke fulfills her daily quota of Bellamy Blake. Like she’s some kind of undersea mammal who’s finally come up to the surface to kill her lungs again. Bellamy is like oxygen. Necessary for survival. And fucking delicious.

“Um.” Clarke clears her throat. “Um. The camera.”

 _Whoops_. That’ll need quite a bit of editing. It’s been at least five minutes. And that kiss definitely veered away from decent somewhere around the two-minute mark.

Bellamy takes gentle hold of her chin and just takes a second to look at her. Look at her thoroughly, contentedly, patiently, like he never plans to stop.

“A hundred,” Bellamy says.

 

 

 **Views** : 531,997

 **Comments:**  3294

 

**Dragonriders of Berk**

!!!!!JHKA FISD!!!!!

**Lyanna Targaryen**

Holy…I don’t…know what to do with my body??

**Redshirt**

OH MY GOD FINALLY CONGRATS OH MY GOD IM SO HAPPY FOR YOU GUYS

**Dany B**

You guys are so beautiful I’m sobbing

**DelenaxThrashx**

TRUE LOVE IS REAL

**Helen of Troy**

AJSDHFLSDKJFHSKFJSF

**Ali Herondale**

Congratulations from Brazil! We are so happy for you beautiful Clarke and Bellamy!! Ahh!

**Rosie Qui**

I! KNEW! IT! I KNEW IT I KNEW IT

**Eleanor S**

My whole life has been waiting for this moment holy shit

**Lily Potter**

I THOGUHT THIS WAS JUST CLICKBAIT AND ALMOST DIDN’T WATCH IT OMFG

**Mariana**

This is what dreeeeeams are made of

**Glen Coco**

Well. I guess I’m going to watch this every day until I die, good night

**Emma W**

Holy fucking shit how long has this been going on? The ultimate long con. Well done. You absolutely assholes. I love you.

**Lena Luthor**

I need an ambulance

**Juan for All**

FUCK YOU TWO FOR MAKING ME FEEL THINGS AND ALSO FUCK YOU TWO ARE GOD DAMN GLORIOUS AND I HOPE YOU HAVE A GREAT FUCKING LIFE TOGETHER. FUCKING GOD DAMN. FUCKING FUCK.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for all your comments and for enjoying this fic! It was a genuine pleasure to write and I hope it brought some happiness and sparkly hearts to your day. <33


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